3D architecture exploration on thermal effect of DRAM refresh

2D design architecture facing the performance bottleneck due to memory wall. Several prior researches on 3D architecture exploration have demonstrated that this problem can be solved by using 3D-stacked memory architecture. However, this stacking architecture comes out a serious thermal problem. Since DRAM refresh operations consume a large amount of power, and no previous work study the thermal effect of refresh operations on 3D architecture. In this work, we compare three DRAM refresh methodologies on stacking memory architecture to evaluate their thermal effect. We also propose a thermal-aware thread migration and memory mapping methodology to reduce the heat dissipation of the stacked memory architecture. Experimental results show that the proposed partial-bank refresh methodology has the largest power reduction, and can reduce the thermal temperature effectively with the proposed memory mapping and thread migration approaches.