Paper Info
Title
Approximate Spintronic Memories
Abstract
AbstractVarious applications, such as multimedia, machine learning, and signal processing, have a significant intrinsic error resilience. This makes them preferable for approximate computing as they have the ability to tolerate computations and data errors along with producing acceptable outputs. From the technology perspective, emerging technologies with inherent non-determinism and high failure rates are candidates for the realization of approximate computing. Spin Transfer Torque Magnetic Random Access Memories (STT-MRAM) is an emerging non-volatile memory technology and a potential candidate to replace SRAM due to its high density, scalability, and zero-leakage. The write operation in this technology is inherently stochastic and increases the rate of write errors. Moreover, this technology is associated with other failure mechanisms such as read-disturb and failures due to data retention. These errors are highly dependent on the STT-MRAM parameters (i.e., thermal stability, read/write current, and read/write latency), which varies with the operating temperature and the process variation effects. Fast and energy-efficient STT-MRAM designed for on-chip memories can be easily achieved by relaxing the device parameters at the cost of increased error rate, which can be addressed by approximating memory accesses. In this work, a detailed study of reliability and gains (i.e., performance and energy) tradeoff at the device and system-level of the STT-MRAM-based data cache system is presented in the scope of approximate memories.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1145/3404980
ACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Thermal stability factor (Delta), magnetic tunneling junction (MIR approximate computing (AC), write error, retention failures, read disturb, application requirements, low-power
Journal
16
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
4
1550-4832
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Nour Sayed132.07
Rajendra Bishnoi213219.64
Mehdi B. Tahoori31537163.44