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
