A case for wafer-scale interconnected memory arrays

The author describes a novel memory architecture, wafer-scale interconnected memory array (WIMA), that is intended to replace ultradensity monolithic DRAM (dynamic random access memory) ICs. This architecture employs the high-performance high-density interconnects provided by the multichip module technology, cache-embedding, and prime-degree interleaving to expose the internal parallelism not exploited by monolithic DRAMs. Using WIMA modules as the basic building blocks, a high-bandwidth, low-latency, and low-cost main memory system is proposed that could support the parallelism among multiple vector access streams. A novel indexing mechanism for prime-degree interleaving is developed which delivers fast and predictable memory access latency with modest hardware requirements