Title
Read disturbance issue for nanoscale STT-MRAM
Abstract
Spin transfer torque magnetic random access memory (STT-MRAM) has been widely considered as one of the most promising candidates for the next-generation nonvolatile memory technologies, thanks to its attractive features, including high density, high speed, low power and high endurance etc. However, our investigation demonstrates that read disturbance may become a big reliability issue of STT-MRAM, since read and write currents share the same path. As technology scales down to nanoscale nodes, this read disturbance issue becomes more serious and may turn into be a critical reliability barrier for STT-MRAM commercialization, because the difference between the read and write currents decreases. In this paper, we propose a circuit to detect the read disturbance by exploiting its typical features, i.e., (a) the resistance (read current) of the memory cell will have a sudden change if read disturbance occurs; (b) only one-direction of read disturbance can occur during normal read operations. Based on the detection results, the correct data can be restored back into the memory cells after read disturbance or system-level algorithms can be employed to correct the read disturbance fault.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1109/NVMSA.2015.7304372
2015 IEEE Non-Volatile Memory System and Applications Symposium (NVMSA)
Keywords
Field
DocType
Nonvolatile memory,read disturbance,reliability,STT-MRAM
Computer science,High density,Magnetoresistive random-access memory,Electronic engineering,Redundancy (engineering),Non-volatile memory,Spin-transfer torque,Random access,Memory cell
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
2575-2561
3
0.38
References 
Authors
10
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yi Ran130.72
Wang Kang216127.54
Youguang Zhang330.38
Jacques-Olivier Klein430.38
Weisheng Zhao5730105.43