FDRAM: DRAM architecture flexible in successive row and column accesses

Abstract

Depending on the screen orientations of mobile devices, image and graphic applications access dynamic random access memory (DRAM) data in the complicated manner. Since conventional DRAMs cannot provide successive data in the same column, however, they achieve poor performance, and high power consumption in any screen orientations. This paper presents a novel DRAM efficient for both portrait and landscape screen orientations of mobile systems. We develop a simple, yet effective memory cell that is activated not only by a row activation command, but also by a new column activation command. Next, our DRAM architecture makes all the memory cells either on the same row, or on the same column successively accessed. The proposed DRAM commands and states are completely compatible with the conventional DRAM. Experimental results show the proposed DRAM is 2.6% more expensive, but achieves 5.8% higher memory utilization, 14.8% shorter memory latency, and 4.4% less memory power consumption than the conventional DRAM on average.