A Soft Real-time Memory Request Scheduler for Phase Change Memory Systems

Phase Change Memory (PCM) has emerged as a viable alternative to traditional DRAM memories especially in real-time embedded systems, due to their higher density and lower leakage power dissipation. However, PCM comes with its own drawbacks. Although, the performances of DRAM and PCM are comparable for memory reads, PCM is about three times slower in terms of write latency, and suffers from significantly lower write endurance. The high write latency of PCM may be detrimental to delivered QoS and may lead to deadline misses in real-time systems. To circumvent the problem, this paper proposes a novel memory scheduling scheme which employs separate write request buffer in order to prioritize reads over writes. The read requests are scheduled using an urgency based scheduler where urgency depends on allowable response times of tasks. The write requests are serviced when there are no pending reads using a similar urgency based scheduler as used for read requests. Experimental evaluation using standard benchmarks reveal that the proposed scheme is able to achieve better normalized QoS compared to existing scheduling techniques for PCM and comparable access latencies with respect to DRAM.