PARTIAL REFRESH TECHNIQUE TO SAVE MEMORY REFRESH POWER

In a conventional memory subsystem, a memory controller issues explicit refresh commands to a DRAM memory device to maintain integrity of the data stored in the memory device when the memory device is in an auto refresh mode. A significant amount of power may be consumed to carry out the refresh. To address this and other issues, it is proposed to allow a partial refresh in the auto refresh mode in which the refreshing operation may be skipped for a subset of the memory cells. Through such selective refresh skipping, the power consumed for auto refreshes may be reduced. Operating system kernels and memory drivers may be configured to determine areas of memory for which the refreshing operation can be skipped.