Enhancing lifetime of phase-change memory for video processor

Abstract

Phase-change memories (PCMs) provide the benefits of non-volatility and capacity, but they show low performance, high power consumption, and low endurance for write operations. Such PCM drawbacks are exacerbated in state-of-the-art video processors that code images block-by-block. In this letter, we propose a PCM subsystem that removes unnecessary write operations resulting from the block-by-block accesses of video processors. Experimental results show that our PCM subsystem improves the lifetime and performance of PCMs up to 716 times and 6.8 times, respectively, on average. Moreover, it makes PCMs consume 69.7 times lower power than the conventional PCM subsystem, on average.