Spansion Methodologies of Optimizing Future Memory Systems

Cellular Phones and Hand Held Devices are adopting new features every few months. The requirement to play performance hungry 3D games enforces a radical increase in the data rates from a mobile system. At the same time the user requirement for long battery life puts a stringent constraint on power consumption of the HW components. As a result existing mobile bus and memory technologies are becoming obsolete and there is a need for new memory architectures that meet data rate and energy efficiency requirement for mobile devices. Efficiently architecting and correctly defining the capabilities of these new memory systems is a key problem in the industry.

This paper discusses Spansion's methodology on estimating performance, namely, BW, power and latency of these future memory subsystems. A method of benchmarking performance data from SystemC based modeling platforms is described that comprehends user applications as user experience is ultimately driven by these applications.