Constructing Reliable Super Dense Phase Change Memory under Write Disturbance

Phase Change Memory (PCM) has better scalability and smaller cell size comparing to DRAM. However, further scaling PCM cell in deep sub-micron regime results in significant thermal based write disturbance. Naively allocating large inter-cell space increases cell size from ideal 4F^2 to 12F^2. While a recent work mitigates write disturbance along word-lines through disturbance resilient data encoding, which can shrink PCM cell size from 12F^2 to 8F^2, it is ineffective for write disturbance along bit-lines, which is more severe due to widely adopted uTrench structure in constructing PCM cell arrays. In this thesis, we propose SD-PCM, an architecture to achieve reliable write operations in Super Dense PCM. In particular, we focus on mitigating write disturbance along bit-lines such that we can construct super dense PCM chips with 4F^2 cell size, i.e., the minimal for diode-switch based PCM. Based on simple verification-n-correction (VnC), we propose LazyCorrection and PreRead to effectively reduce VnC overhead and minimize cascading verification during write. We further propose (n:m)-Alloc for achieving good tradeoff between VnC overhead minimization and memory capacity loss. Our experimental results show that, comparing to a write disturbance-free low density PCM, SD-PCM achieves 80% capacity improvement in cell arrays while incurring around 0-10% performance degradation when using different (n:m) allocators