Name
Abstract | ||
|---|---|---|
Emerging non-volatile magnetic memories such as the spin-torque-transfer random access memories (STT-RAMs) provide superior density and energy benefits compared to conventional DRAM or Flash based memories. However, these technologies often suffer from reliability issues and thus strong conventional reliability schemes are required. These schemes have large overhead for storage which, in turn, can potentially eclipse the density and energy benefits these technologies promise. Moreover, the read and write operations in STT-RAMs show asymmetric behaviour i.e., bit-flip probability of 1→0 is significantly higher than 0→1. However, conventional Error Correcting Codes (ECCs) treat both 0 and 1 flips similarly and thus result in unbalanced reliability of these two types of errors. In this work, we propose a new ECC protection scheme for STT-RAM based main memories, compression with multi-ECC (CME). First we try to compress every cache line to reduce its size. Based on the amount of compression possible, we use the saved additional bits to increase the protection from the baseline Single Error Correcting, Double Error Detecting (SECDED) code to stronger ECC schemes, if possible. Compression itself reduces the hamming weight of the cache lines, thus reducing the probability of 1→0 bit-flips. Opportunistically using stronger ECC schemes further helps tolerate multiple bit-flips in a cache line. Our results show that for STT-RAM based main memories, CME can reduce the block failure probability by up to 240x (average 7x) over using a (72,64) SECDED scheme for each cache line word. The latency and area overheads of CME is minimal with average performance degradation of less than 1.4%.
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Year | DOI | Venue |
|---|---|---|
2019 | 10.1145/3357526.3357533 | Proceedings of the International Symposium on Memory Systems |
Keywords | Field | DocType |
STT-RAM, cache line compression, multi-ECC | Compression (physics),Computer science,Embedded system | Conference |
ISBN | Citations | PageRank |
978-1-4503-7206-0 | 0 | 0.34 |
References | Authors | |
0 | 3 | |
Name | Order | Citations | PageRank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Irina Alam | 1 | 0 | 1.35 |
| Saptadeep Pal | 2 | 5 | 1.47 |
| Puneet Gupta | 3 | 1158 | 117.59 |