FN-CACTI: Advanced CACTI for FinFET and NC-FinFET Technologies

Cache memories are an indispensable component of many processor-based systems and contribute significantly to the overall area, power consumption, and delay. This leads to an important role played by modeling tools for estimating the area, power consumption, and access time of cache memories. Howeve...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on very large scale integration (VLSI) systems 2022-03, Vol.30 (3), p.339-352
Main Authors: Ravipati, Divya Praneetha, Kedia, Rajesh, Van Santen, Victor M., Henkel, Jorg, Panda, Preeti Ranjan, Amrouch, Hussam
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Access time
Cache modeling
CACTI
Capacitance
Data models
emerging technology
Energy consumption
Field effect transistors
FinFET
FinFETs
Integrated circuit modeling
Logic gates
Microprocessors
Modelling
negative capacitance fin field effect transistor (NC-FinFET)
New technology
Power consumption
Power demand
Power management
Semiconductor devices
Transistors
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Summary:Cache memories are an indispensable component of many processor-based systems and contribute significantly to the overall area, power consumption, and delay. This leads to an important role played by modeling tools for estimating the area, power consumption, and access time of cache memories. However, existing modeling tools such as CACTI and its various extensions have been primarily designed using data from various projections. For the first time, we propose an entire flow for obtaining/calibrating the transistor characteristics from a commercial technology and use these characteristics within CACTI. We also improve the modeling approach to make them more fine-grained and follow recent manufacturing trends suitable for FinFET technology. Further, for the first time, we extend CACTI to support negative capacitance fin field effect transistor (NC-FinFET), an emerging technology depicting negative capacitance whose current and capacitive characteristics are very different compared to those of the FinFET. We use the proposed tool (FN-CACTI) to identify NC-FinFET-based caches to be significantly more energy-efficient than corresponding FinFET-based caches. We also study an application of FN-CACTI to determine optimal voltages corresponding to the lowest energy consumption for NC-FinFET and FinFET-based caches of various sizes.
ISSN:1063-8210
1557-9999
DOI:10.1109/TVLSI.2021.3123112