NORmal: Architecting 3D Ferroelectric NOR Flash as Main Memory -- From Co-Fabricated BEOL Arrays to 200B-Class Multi-Agent LLMs in a Smartphone

Smartphone agents increasingly work as teams, in which a large planner directs parallel workers across long sessions. Running such a team on the device requires 200B-class models and contexts that exceed phone DRAM many times over, yet existing tiers treat flash as storage: UFS starves per-token weight streaming, and mobile High-Bandwidth Flash (HBF) needs a redesigned SoC and cannot absorb continuous KV writes. We show that a non-volatile memory can join an unmodified LPDDR6 bus as a plain rank only if its access latency fits the DRAM timing window, a condition no NAND tier meets. We present NORmal, to our knowledge the first main-memory architecture for 3D ferroelectric NOR flash. We have fabricated and experimentally characterized back-end-of-line (BEOL) 3D FeNOR arrays that co-integrate dense 3-bit MLC and fast, high-endurance in-place-writable SLC with sub-7.5 ns sensing. NORmal turns these co-fabricated arrays into a byte-addressable, deterministic-timing load/store rank on an unmodified LPDDR6 interface through an under-array DRAM-emulation bridge, staggered bank reads with zero-cycle weight swizzling, and posted SLC writes. Across this rank and DRAM, NORmal places agent state by mutability and lifetime rather than by hotness, serving 200B-class models and persistent planner contexts in place while dynamically partitioning subchannels across agent phases. In serving-level simulation on production agent traces, NORmal is 8.9$\times$--28.0$\times$ faster than UFS offloading, within 0.4% of an unlimited-DRAM ideal, and 2.8$\times$--6.3$\times$ faster than HBF on sessions beyond 256K tokens, with 8.1$\times$--17.8$\times$ less memory energy per token.

Authors

Publication Details

Journal
arXiv (Cornell University)
Published
2026-10-29
DOI
https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2610.40000
Primary Topic
Advanced Data Storage Technologies
Type
preprint
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preprint

NORmal: Architecting 3D Ferroelectric NOR Flash as Main Memory -- From Co-Fabricated BEOL Arrays to 200B-Class Multi-Agent LLMs in a Smartphone

Xuxiao Yang, Youwei Zhuo, Zhaori Cong, Jinshan Yue et al.
arXiv (Cornell University)
Advanced Data Storage Technologies
preprint

NORmal: Architecting 3D Ferroelectric NOR Flash as Main Memory -- From Co-Fabricated BEOL Arrays to 200B-Class Multi-Agent LLMs in a Smartphone

Xuxiao Yang, Youwei Zhuo, Zhaori Cong, Jinshan Yue, Di Geng, Zhuohang Bian, Haochen Yu, Chen Gu, Qing Luo, Yibo Zhao, Ling Li, Zhuoran Li
preprint en

Abstract

Smartphone agents increasingly work as teams, in which a large planner directs parallel workers across long sessions. Running such a team on the device requires 200B-class models and contexts that exceed phone DRAM many times over, yet existing tiers treat flash as storage: UFS starves per-token weight streaming, and mobile High-Bandwidth Flash (HBF) needs a redesigned SoC and cannot absorb continuous KV writes. We show that a non-volatile memory can join an unmodified LPDDR6 bus as a plain rank only if its access latency fits the DRAM timing window, a condition no NAND tier meets. We present NORmal, to our knowledge the first main-memory architecture for 3D ferroelectric NOR flash. We have fabricated and experimentally characterized back-end-of-line (BEOL) 3D FeNOR arrays that co-integrate dense 3-bit MLC and fast, high-endurance in-place-writable SLC with sub-7.5 ns sensing. NORmal turns these co-fabricated arrays into a byte-addressable, deterministic-timing load/store rank on an unmodified LPDDR6 interface through an under-array DRAM-emulation bridge, staggered bank reads with zero-cycle weight swizzling, and posted SLC writes. Across this rank and DRAM, NORmal places agent state by mutability and lifetime rather than by hotness, serving 200B-class models and persistent planner contexts in place while dynamically partitioning subchannels across agent phases. In serving-level simulation on production agent traces, NORmal is 8.9$\times$--28.0$\times$ faster than UFS offloading, within 0.4% of an unlimited-DRAM ideal, and 2.8$\times$--6.3$\times$ faster than HBF on sessions beyond 256K tokens, with 8.1$\times$--17.8$\times$ less memory energy per token.

arXiv (Cornell University)
Advanced Data Storage Technologies
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