PCMCsim: An Accurate Phase-Change Memory Controller Simulator and its Performance Analysis

Abstract

With the growing demand for technology scaling and storage capacity in data centers, phase-change memory (PCM) has garnered attention as a next-generation nonvolatile memory (NVM). However, an accurate simulator that includes the necessary hardware features for PCM is not available, lagging behind current PCM technology. In this study, a functional and cycle-accurate PCM controller simulator, called PCMCsim, is presented to revitalize the related research. The proposed simulator incorporates necessary features for current PCM products and the latest DDR5 specifications. Based on rigorous performance analysis, this study characterizes bottlenecks of the PCM subsystem by sweeping hardware parameters, providing important takeaway messages to designers. Furthermore, the latency is significantly reduced by introducing a dedicated prefetcher into the address translation module. The proposed simulator is validated against a command trace made by a PCM product developer. We release our simulator as open-source software, except for industry-confidential features.11https://github.com/harrylee365/pcmcsim-pub1ic