Architecting 3D vertical resistive memory for next-generation storage systems

Resistive Random Access Memory (ReRAM) has several advantages over current NAND Flash technology, highlighting orders of magnitude lower access latency and higher endurance. Recently proposed 3D vertical cross-point ReRAM (3D-VRAM) architecture is an encouraging development in ReRAM's evolution as a cost-competitive solution, and thus attracts a lot of attention in both industry and academia. In this work, an array-level model to estimate the read/write energy and characterize the vertical access transistor is developed. We use the model to study a range of design trade-offs by tuning the cell-level characteristics and the read/write schemes. The design space exploration addresses several critical issues that are either unique to 3D-VRAM or have substantially different concerns from the 2D cross-point array design. It provides insights on the design optimizations of the array density and access energy, and several important conclusions have been reached. Then we propose multi-directional write driver to mitigate the writer circuitry overhead, and use remote sensing scheme to take full advantage of limited on-die sensing resources. The benefits of these optimizations are evaluated and validated in our macro-architecture model. With trace-based simulations, system-level comparisons between 3D-VRAM and a wide spectrum of memories are performed in mixed aspects of performance, cost, and energy. The results show that our optimized 3D-VRAM design are better than other contenders for storage memory in both performance and energy.