Abstract
The thriving growth in mobile consumer electronics keeps the energy efficiency in the embedded system design a recurring theme. PCM main memory has shown its potential in replacing DRAM due to the huge amount of energy reduction, e.g. 65%. When considering the usage of PCM main memory, its write endurance becomes a critical issue, and wear leveling design is a common approach to resolve this issue. Even though the wear leveling design should emphasize on the operation efficiency and overhead reduction, existing wear leveling strategies designed for PCM main memory are usually enforced to prolong the lifetime of PCM in best effort. We propose a warranty-aware page management design to mitigate the operation overhead required for managing the endurance issue in PCM. A cooling-based wear leveling is proposed to guarantee that PCM pages will not live less than warranty period. The experiment results showed the cooling-based design reduced the overhead to one third of that of the state-of-the-art designs while having the same level of performance.