A space-based wear leveling for PCM-based embedded systems

Phase change memory (PCM) has emerged as a promising candidate to replace DRAM in embedded systems. However, it can only sustain a limited number of write operations. To solve this issue, this paper proposes a novel and effective wear-leveling technique in software level to prolong the lifetime of PCM-based embedded systems. A polynomial-time algorithm, Multi-Space Wear Leveling Algorithm (MWL), is proposed to achieve effective wear-leveling. The experimental results show our technique can greatly extend the lifetime of PCM-based embedded systems compared with the previous work. Compared with the method without adopting wear-leveling, it introduces no more than 0.7% extra writes and 0.6% running overhead.