1 research outputs found
Mitigating Write Disturbance Errors of Phase-Change Memory as In-Module Approach
With the growing demand for technology scaling and storage capacity in server
systems to support high-performance computing, phase-change memory (PCM) has
garnered attention as the next-generation non-volatile memory to satisfy these
requirements. However, write disturbance error (WDE) appears as a serious
reliability problem preventing PCM from general commercialization. WDE occurs
on the neighboring cells of a written cell due to heat dissipation. Previous
studies for the prevention of WDEs are based on the write cache or
verify-n-correction while they often suffer from significant area overhead and
performance degradation, making it unsuitable for high-performance computing.
Therefore, an on-demand correction is required to minimize the performance
overhead. In this paper, an in-module disturbance barrier (IMDB) mitigating
WDEs is proposed. IMDB includes two sets of SRAMs into two levels and evicts
entries with a policy that leverages the characteristics of WDE. In this work,
the comparator dedicated to the replacement policy requires significant
hardware resources and latency. Thus, an approximate comparator is designed to
reduce the area and latency considerably. Furthermore, the exploration of
architecture parameters is conducted to obtain cost-effective design. The
proposed work significantly reduces WDEs without a noticeable speed degradation
and additional energy consumption compared to previous methods