Abstract: As a promising alternative candidate for DRAM, non-volatile memory (NVM) technique gains increasing interests from both industry and academia. Currently, the main problems that limit the wide utilization of NVM include considerable long latency for write operation, high energy consumption for write operation and limited write endurance. To solve these problems, the traditional solutions are based on computer architecture methods, such as adding extra level or scheduling scheme. Unfortunately, these solutions often suffer from unavoidable high soft/hardware overheads and can hardly optimize the architecture for more than one target at the same time. In recent years, as the improvement of research on non-volatile materials, several dynamical trade-offs lies in the materials are introduced, which also provides new opportunity for computer architecture research. Based on these trade-offs, several novel NVM architectures have been proposed. Compared with the traditional solutions, these proposed architectures have a series of advantages, such as low hardware overhead and the ability of optimizing for multi-targets. In this survey, we firstly introduce the existing problems of NVM and the traditional solutions. Then, we present three important dynamical trade-offs of NVM. After that, we introduce the newly proposed architectures based on these trade-offs. Finally, we make the conclusion for this kind of research work and point out some potential opportunities.

Key words: non-volatile memory (NVM), phase change memory, spin-transfer torque RAM, memristor, dynamical trade-off