Paper Info
Title
CODIC: A Low-Cost Substrate for Enabling Custom In-DRAM Functionalities and Optimizations
Abstract
DRAM is the dominant main memory technology used in modern computing systems. Computing systems implement a memory controller that interfaces with DRAM via DRAM commands. DRAM executes the given commands using internal components (e.g., access transistors, sense amplifiers) that are orchestrated by DRAM internal timings, which are fixed for each DRAM command. Unfortunately, the use of fixed internal timings limits the types of operations that DRAM can perform and hinders the implementation of new functionalities and custom mechanisms that improve DRAM reliability, performance and energy. To overcome these limitations, we propose enabling programmable DRAM internal timings for controlling in-DRAM components.To this end, we design CODIC, a new low-cost DRAM substrate that enables fine-grained control over four previously fixed internal DRAM timings that are key to many DRAM operations. We implement CODIC with only minimal changes to the DRAM chip and the DDRx interface. To demonstrate the potential of CODIC, we propose two new CODIC-based security mechanisms that outperform state-of-the-art mechanisms in several ways: (1) a new DRAM Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) that is more robust and has significantly higher throughput than state-of-the-art DRAM PUFs, and (2) the first cold boot attack prevention mechanism that does not introduce any performance or energy overheads at runtime.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1109/ISCA52012.2021.00045
2021 ACM/IEEE 48th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA)
Keywords
DocType
ISSN
dominant main memory technology,modern computing systems,memory controller,DRAM command,given commands,internal components,fixed internal timings,custom mechanisms,DRAM reliability,programmable DRAM internal timings,in-DRAM components,low-cost DRAM substrate,fixed internal DRAM timings,DRAM operations,DRAM chip,CODIC-based security mechanisms,state-of-the-art DRAM PUFs,custom in-DRAM functionalities,DRAM physical unclonable function,CODIC
Conference
1063-6897
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-6654-3334-1
2
0.35
References 
Authors
0
13
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Lois Orosa1224.20
Yaohua Wang24414.23
Mohammad Sadrosadati3819.33
Jeremie Kim426313.68
Minesh Patel52049.82
Ivan Puddu641.04
Haocong Luo7131.78
Kaveh Razavi836017.94
Juan Gómez-Luna920923.34
Hasan Hassan1035217.76
Nika Mansouri-Ghiasi11181.54
Saugata Ghose1271836.45
Onur Mutlu139446357.40