Electronic Devices And The Key Driver Of The Performance

1443 Words6 Pages
Over the last decades, electronics industry had a tremendous growth and became a main pillar of the overall world’s economy. Electronic mobile devices are replacing the conventional ways people used to interact and perceive information, and created unprecedented uses that don’t have conventional counterparts: health and fitness trackers, smart watches and virtual assistants to name a few. The sustained advancement of the semiconductor silicon based technology is the key driver of the performance enhancements and functionality expansion of the electronic devices. This extraordinary growth of the electronic devices types and functionality is imposing urgent needs of higher computational speeds, better data transmission bandwidths and…show more content…
An SRAM cell usually consists of six transistors and every cell is used to store one bit. Therefore, this memory is not dense and consumes a large area of the CPU real-estate. There is no nonvolatile replacement, at least nowadays, that can match the switching speeds of the SRAM. The closest rivals’ switching speeds are at orders of magnitude slower [12], [13]. The second element in the memory hierarchy is the Dynamic RAM (DRAM), each DRAM cell consists of a single transistor and a capacitor (1T-1C) and only stores one bit. Hence, compared to SRAM it is much denser [14]. The access time of DRAM is in the order of ~10ns. DRAM requires consistent refreshing due to charge leakage and destructive read (i.e. the information is lost upon the cell reading. The embedded version of DRAM (EDRAM) is used as a last level cache (Figure 1 1)[1]. Magnetic storage Hard Drive (HDD) is the densest and the slowest storage element in the memory hierarchy as it provides terabytes (Tb) of memory at very low cost at the expense of very long access latencies with regarding to a random access operation [1]. NAND flash is the solid-state counterpart of the magnetic HDD with three order of magnitude higher access speeds. It is the highest density memory [15], and is commonly used in high-speed disk systems [16]. Integrating the main memory onto the CPU can drastically improve the computation speed by eliminating the I/O bottleneck to off-chip
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