A DRAM cell requires periodic refresh operations to preserve data in its leaky capacitor. Previously, the overheads of refresh operations were insignificant. But, as both the size and speed of DRAM chips have increased significantly in the past decade, refresh has become a dominating factor of DRAM performance and power dissipation. The objective of this dissertation is to conduct a comprehensive study of the issues related to refresh operations in modern DRAM devices and thereafter, propose techniques to mitigate refresh penalties.

To understand the growing consequences of refresh operations, first we describe various refresh command scheduling schemes; analyze the refresh modes and timings in modern commodity DRAM devices; and characterize the variations in DRAM cells' retention time. Then, we quantify refresh penalties by varying device speed, size, timings, and total memory capacity. Furthermore, we also summarize prior refresh mechanisms and their applicability in future computing systems. Finally, based on our experiments and observations, we propose techniques to improve refresh energy efficiency and mitigate refresh scalability problems.

Refresh operations not only introduce performance penalty but also pose energy overheads. In addition to the energy required for refreshing, the background energy component, dissipated by DRAM peripheral circuitry and on-die DLL during refresh command, will become significant in future devices. We propose a set of techniques referred collectively as "coordinated refresh", in which scheduling of low power modes and refresh commands are coordinated so that most of the required refreshes are issued when the DRAM device is in the deepest low power "self refresh" (SR) mode. Our approach saves background power because the peripheral circuitry and clocks are turned off in the SR mode.

Moreover, we observe that as the number of rows in DRAM scales, a large body of research on refresh reduction using retention time and access awareness will be rendered ineffective. Because these mechanisms require the memory controller to have fine-grained control over which regions of the memory are refreshed, while in JEDEC DDRx devices, a refresh operation is carried out via an "auto-refresh" command, which refreshes multiple rows from multiple banks simultaneously. The internal implementation of "auto-refresh" is completely opaque outside the DRAM -- all the memory controller can do is tell the DRAM to refresh itself -- the DRAM handles everything else, in particular determining which rows in which banks are to be refreshed. We propose a modification to the DRAM that extends its existing control-register access protocol to include the DRAM's internal refresh counter and also introduce a new "dummy refresh" command that skips refresh operations and simply increments the internal counter. We show that these modifications allow a memory controller to reduce as many refreshes as in prior work, while achieving significant energy and performance advantages by using auto-refresh most of the time.