Title
Enhancing the Reliability of STT-RAM through Circuit and System Level Techniques
Abstract
Spin torque transfer random access memory (STT-RAM) is a promising memory technology because of its fast read access, high storage density, and very low standby power. These memories have reliability issues that need to be better understood before they can be adopted as a mainstream memory technology. In this paper, we first study the causes of errors for a single STT memory cell. We see that process variations and variations in the device geometry affect their failure rate and develop error models to capture these effects. Next we propose a joint technique based on tuning of circuit level parameters and error control coding (ECC) to achieve very high reliability. Such a combination allows the use of weaker ECC with smaller overhead. For instance, we show that by applying voltage boosting and write pulse width adjustment, the error correction capability (t) of ECC can be reduced from t=11 to t=3 to achieve a block failure rate (BFR) of 10^-9.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1109/SiPS.2012.11
SiPS
Keywords
Field
DocType
error model,error control coding,promising memory technology,mainstream memory technology,block failure rate,weaker ecc,system level techniques,error correction capability,single stt memory cell,failure rate,random access memory,failure analysis
Standby power,Computer science,Failure rate,Error detection and correction,Real-time computing,Process variation,Spin-transfer torque,Computer hardware,Bit error rate,Memory cell,Random access
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
2162-3562
978-1-4673-2986-6
7
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.82
7
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yunus Emre1605.60
Chengen Yang2565.47
Ketul Sutaria3493.33
Yu Cao432929.78
Chaitali Chakrabarti51978184.17