Title
Optimizing Write Fidelity of MRAMs by Alternating Water-Filling Algorithm
Abstract
Magnetic random-access memory (MRAM) is a promising memory technology due to its high density, non-volatility, and high endurance. However, achieving high memory fidelity incurs high write-energy costs, which should be reduced for large-scale deployment of MRAMs. In this paper, we formulate a <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">biconvex</i> optimization problem to optimize write fidelity given energy and latency constraints. The basic idea is to allocate non-uniform write pulses depending on the importance of each bit position. The fidelity measure we consider is mean squared error (MSE), for which we optimize write pulses via alternating convex search (ACS). We derive analytic solutions and propose an <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">alternating water-filling</i> algorithm by casting the MRAM’s write operation as communication over parallel channels. Hence, the proposed alternating water-filling algorithm is computationally more efficient than the original ACS while their solutions are identical. Since the formulated biconvex problem is non-convex, both the original ACS and the proposed algorithm do not guarantee global optimality. However, the MSEs obtained by the proposed algorithm are comparable to the MSEs by complicated global nonlinear programming solvers. Furthermore, we prove that our algorithm can reduce the MSE exponentially with the number of bits per word. For an 8-bit accessed word, the proposed algorithm reduces the MSE by a factor of 21. We also evaluate MNIST dataset classification supposing that the model parameters of deep neural networks are stored in MRAMs. The numerical results show that the optimized write pulses can achieve 40% write-energy reduction for the same classification accuracy.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1109/TCOMM.2022.3190868
IEEE Transactions on Communications
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Magnetic random-access memory (MRAM),approximate memory,approximate storage,biconvex optimization,information theory
Journal
70
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
9
0090-6778
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
21
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yongjune Kim100.34
Yoocharn Jeon200.34
Hyeokjin Choi300.34
Cyril Guyot400.34
Yuval Cassuto500.34