NVM-Charade: An Open-Sourced FPGA Based NVM Characterization Scheme

Accurate characterization of real device samples is essential for understanding the true potential of the emerging nonvolatile memories (NVMs), and identifying their optimal placement in the memory hierarchy. Unfortunately, most existing publicly-available resources provide performance and reliability data acquired from analytic models or simulation based studies. In this work, we present NVM-Charade, an opensourced, highly configurable FPGA based empirical data extraction scheme for various NVM technologies. At this juncture, our proposed scheme is a comprehensive evaluation setup with fine-grained user control that extracts reliable endurance, retention, latency, and power data for a real MRAM product.