Research on New Non-Volatile Storage

Recently, the performance gap between CPU and storage system has been continually increasing, resulting in the consequence that the storage system becomes the bottleneck of performance improvement of the overall computer systems. With the rapid development of microelectronics technology, new non-volatile storage devices that have the metrics of non-volatility, low power consumption, good scalability and shock resistance, are attracting a great attention from academia and industry. This paper introduces several new non-volatile storage devices (i.e., STT-RAM, RRAM, PCRAM and FeRAM) and compares their performance characteristics with those of traditional storage devices. We further discuss the current exploratory works that seek for lower power consumption, higher reliability and better scalability by applying the new non-volatile storage devices to the current three levels of storage architecture (i.e., cache-level, main-memory-level and external-storage-level). A detailed analysis is then presented which focuses on some strategies to mitigate the inherent drawbacks of the new non-volatile storage devices in the application, such as the limited write endurance and the performance imbalance between the read and write operations. Finally, a panoramic summary is given and the possible future development tendencies are discussed.