January 25, 2011
ECE Assistant Professor Onur Mutlu's paper, "Phase Change Memory Architecture and the Quest for Scalability" was published as a selected Research Highlight in the July 2010 issue of Communications of the ACM (CACM) magazine. The paper proposes architectural enhancements to enable phase change memory - an emerging non-volatile memory technology - to replace dynamic random access memory (DRAM) as the primary physical memory in computer systems. Mutlu and his colleagues hope phase change memory will create a more technology-scalable, cost-efficient and energy-efficient memory system than can be obtained with DRAM. To this end, the paper proposes microarchitectural techniques to mitigate latency, energy and endurance shortcomings of phase change memory vis-Ã -vis DRAM. The paper's co-authors include Benjamin Lee (Duke University), Engin Ipek (University of Rochester) and Doug Burger (Microsoft), and its work is synergistic with the scalable memory systems research conducted in Mutlu's SAFARI research group. To view the paper, click here.
CACM Research Highlights are selected by a committee from a set of papers nominated by individual communities (SIGs) in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The selected paper originally appeared in the 36th International Symposium on Computer Architecture. The original, more detailed version of the paper can be viewed here.
Assistant Professor of ECE Onur Mutlu