High-Performance Energy-Efficient and Reliable Design of Spin-Transfer Torque Magnetic Memory

In this dissertation new computing paradigms, architectures and design philosophy are proposed and evaluated for adopting the STT-MRAM technology as highly reliable, energy efficient and fast memory. For this purpose, a novel cross-layer framework from the cell-level all the way up to the system- and application-level has been developed. In these framework, the reliability issues are modeled accurately with appropriate fault models at different abstraction levels in order to analyze the overall failure rates of the entire memory and its Mean Time To Failure (MTTF) along with considering the temperature and process variation effects. Design-time, compile-time and run-time solutions have been provided to address the challenges associated with STT-MRAM. The effectiveness of the proposed solutions is demonstrated in extensive experiments that show significant improvements in comparison to state-of-the-art solutions, i.e. lower-power, higher-performance and more reliable STT-MRAM design

Architectural Techniques for Disturbance Mitigation in Future Memory Systems

With the recent advancements of CMOS technology, scaling down the feature size has improved memory capacity, power, performance and cost. However, such dramatic progress in memory technology has increasingly made the precise control of the manufacturing process below 22nm more difficult. In spite of all these virtues, the technology scaling road map predicts significant process variation from cell-to-cell. It also predicts electromagnetic disturbances among memory cells that easily deviate their circuit characterizations from design goals and pose threats to the reliability, energy efficiency and security. This dissertation proposes simple, energy-efficient and low-overhead techniques that combat the challenges resulting from technology scaling in future memory systems. Specifically, this dissertation investigates solutions tuned to particular types of disturbance challenges, such as inter-cell or intra-cell disturbance, that are energy efficient while guaranteeing memory reliability. The contribution of this dissertation will be threefold. First, it uses a deterministic counter-based approach to target the root of inter-cell disturbances in Dynamic random access memory (DRAM) and provide further benefits to overall energy consumption while deterministically mitigating inter-cell disturbances. Second, it uses Markov chains to reason about the reliability of Spin-Transfer Torque Magnetic Random-Access Memory (STT-RAM) that suffers from intra-cell disturbances and then investigates on-demand refresh policies to recover from the persistent effect of such disturbances. Third, It leverages an encoding technique integrated with a novel word level compression scheme to reduce the vulnerability of cells to inter-cell write disturbances in Phase Change Memory (PCM). However, mitigating inter-cell write disturbances and also minimizing the write energy may increase the number of updated PCM cells and result in degraded endurance. Hence, It uses multi-objective optimization to balance the write energy and endurance in PCM cells while mitigating intercell disturbances. The work in this dissertation provides important insights into how to tackle the critical reliability challenges that high-density memory systems confront in deep scaled technology nodes. It advocates for various memory technologies to guarantee reliability of future memory systems while incurring nominal costs in terms of energy, area and performance

Architectural Techniques to Enable Reliable and Scalable Memory Systems

High capacity and scalable memory systems play a vital role in enabling our desktops, smartphones, and pervasive technologies like Internet of Things (IoT). Unfortunately, memory systems are becoming increasingly prone to faults. This is because we rely on technology scaling to improve memory density, and at small feature sizes, memory cells tend to break easily. Today, memory reliability is seen as the key impediment towards using high-density devices, adopting new technologies, and even building the next Exascale supercomputer. To ensure even a bare-minimum level of reliability, present-day solutions tend to have high performance, power and area overheads. Ideally, we would like memory systems to remain robust, scalable, and implementable while keeping the overheads to a minimum. This dissertation describes how simple cross-layer architectural techniques can provide orders of magnitude higher reliability and enable seamless scalability for memory systems while incurring negligible overheads.Comment: PhD thesis, Georgia Institute of Technology (May 2017

High-Performance and Low-Power Magnetic Material Memory Based Cache Design

Magnetic memory technologies are very promising candidates to be universal memory due to its good scalability, zero standby power and radiation hardness. Having a cell area much smaller than SRAM, magnetic memory can be used to construct much larger cache with the same die footprint, leading to siginficant improvement of overall system performance and power consumption especially in this multi-core era. However, magnetic memories have their own drawbacks such as slow write, read disturbance and scaling limitation, making its usage as caches challenging. This dissertation comprehensively studied these two most popular magnetic memory technologies. Design exploration and optimization for the cache design from different design layers including the memory devices, peripheral circuit, memory array structure and micro-architecture are presented. By leveraging device features, two major micro-architectures -multi-retention cache hierarchy and process-variation-aware cache are presented to improve the write performance of STT-RAM. The enhancement in write performance results in the degradation of read operations, in terms of both speed and data reliability. This dissertation also presents an architecture to resolve STT-RAM read disturbance issue. Furthermore, the scaling of STT-RAM is hindered due to the required size of switching transistor. To break the cell area limitation of STT-RAM, racetrack memory is studied to achieve an even higher memory density and better performance and lower energy consumption. With dedicated elaboration, racetrack memory based cache design can achieve a siginificant area reduction and energy saving when compared to optimized STT-RAM

Dependable Embedded Systems

This Open Access book introduces readers to many new techniques for enhancing and optimizing reliability in embedded systems, which have emerged particularly within the last five years. This book introduces the most prominent reliability concerns from today’s points of view and roughly recapitulates the progress in the community so far. Unlike other books that focus on a single abstraction level such circuit level or system level alone, the focus of this book is to deal with the different reliability challenges across different levels starting from the physical level all the way to the system level (cross-layer approaches). The book aims at demonstrating how new hardware/software co-design solution can be proposed to ef-fectively mitigate reliability degradation such as transistor aging, processor variation, temperature effects, soft errors, etc. Provides readers with latest insights into novel, cross-layer methods and models with respect to dependability of embedded systems; Describes cross-layer approaches that can leverage reliability through techniques that are pro-actively designed with respect to techniques at other layers; Explains run-time adaptation and concepts/means of self-organization, in order to achieve error resiliency in complex, future many core systems