Title
Read disturbance issue and design techniques 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 significant reliability issue of STT-MRAM. 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 first give deep analyses on the read disturbance issue of STT-MRAM as technology scales and present a model to capture the features, then 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, further correction technique and optimization strategy are presented to deal with the read disturbance faults as well as to keep the least latency and power overheads.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1016/j.sysarc.2016.05.005
Journal of Systems Architecture
Keywords
Field
DocType
Nonvolatile memory,Read disturbance,Reliability,STT-MRAM
Computer science,Latency (engineering),Parallel computing,High density,Magnetoresistive random-access memory,Non-volatile memory,Spin-transfer torque,Random access,Memory cell
Journal
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
71
1383-7621
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yi Ran130.72
Wang Kang216127.54
Youguang Zhang3217.75
Jacques-Olivier Klein446146.64
Weisheng Zhao5730105.43