PCM and Memristor based nanocrossbars

This paper presents performance comparison between two emerging resistive Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) technologies; namely Memristors and Phase Change Memory (PCM); using nanocrossbar architecture. A comparison in terms of leakage current, reading and writing delay, and energy consumption between both non-volatile memory devices, with SRAM based nanocrossbar as benchmark was carried. It was found that Memristive crossbars offer 3 orders of magnitude improvement in the average read cycle, compared to SRAM based crossbars. On the other hand; both PCM based and Memristor based crossbars offered more than 2 orders of magnitude improvement in leakage energy compared to SRAM based crossbars. The aim of this comparison is to provide a fair simulation platform to study and compare PCM crossbar and Memristive crossbar.