Paper Info
Title
Aware: Adaptive Way Allocation For Reconfigurable Eccs To Protect Write Errors In Stt-Ram Caches
Abstract
Spin-Transfer Torque Random Access Memories (STT-RAMs) are a promising alternative to SRAMs in on-chip caches. STT-RAMs face with a high error rate in write operations due to stochastic switching. To alleviate this problem, Error-Correcting Codes (ECCs) are commonly used, which results in a significant area and energy consumption overhead. This paper proposes an efficient technique, so-called Adaptive Way Allocation for Reconfigurable ECCs (AWARE), to correct write errors in STT-RAM caches. AWARE exploits the asymmetric error rate in cell switching directions, which leads to data-dependent write error rates, to reduce the ECC overheads without compromising the reliability of the cache. To this end, instead of protecting all cache lines using strong ECCs, AWARE employs a simple ECC that guarantees a given reliability level for the majority of writes. Meanwhile, when a data block with high error rate is written, one way in the target set is adaptively configured to store the check bits of a strong ECC for this block. The evaluation results show that, compared with conventional ECCs, AWARE reduces the ECC area by about 81.2 percent and the cache energy consumption by about 9.5 percent. These reductions are achieved by imposing less than 1 percent performance overhead and without compromising the reliability.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1109/TETC.2017.2701880
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON EMERGING TOPICS IN COMPUTING
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Asymmetric switching, write error, reconfigurable error-correcting codes (ECCs), STT-RAM caches
Journal
7
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
3
2168-6750
2
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.37
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Zahra Azad171.13
Hamed Farbeh2479.85
Amir Mahdi Hosseini Monazzah3326.89
Seyed Ghassem Miremadi453150.32