Analysis of the PASR Standard and Its Usability in Handheld Operating Systems Such as Linux

Overview

With companies now producing Low Power DRAM for handhelds, a new feature was developed called Partial Array Self Refresh (PASR). This feature enables the DRAM to retain state in only part of memory, thus further reducing the self-refresh power. If handheld operating systems could use this feature, they could potentially add hours of battery life. This has not happened because the PASR footprint provided cannot be easily integrated into established OS memory management schemes. The PASR power savings below assumes that the handheld device consumes a total of 4mW in sleep mode with the entire DRAM self-refreshed.