MERAM: Non-Volatile Cache Memory Based on Magneto-Electric FETs

Abstract: Magneto-Electric FET (MEFET) is a recently developed post-CMOS FET, which offers intriguing characteristics for high speed and low-power design in both logic and memory applications. In this paper, for the first time, we propose a non-volatile 2T-1MEFET memory bit-cell with separate read and write paths. We show that with proper co-design at the device, cell and array levels, such a design is a promising candidate for fast non-volatile cache memory, termed as MERAM. To further evaluate its performance in memory system, we, for the first time, build a device-to-architecture cross-layer evaluation framework based on an experimentally-calibrated MEFET device model to quantitatively analyze and benchmark the proposed MERAM design with other memory technologies, including both volatile memory (i.e. SRAM, eDRAM) and other popular non-volatile emerging memory (i.e. ReRAM, STT-MRAM, and SOT-MRAM). The experiment results show that MERAM has a high state distinguishability with almost 36x magnitude difference in sense current. Results for the PARSEC benchmark suite indicate that as an L2 cache alternative, MERAM reduces Energy Area Latency (EAT) product on average by ~98\% and ~70\% compared with typical 6T SRAM and 2T SOT-MRAM platforms, respectively.