On Error Correction for Nonvolatile Processing-In-Memory

TL;DR

This paper explores error correction strategies for nonvolatile processing-in-memory systems, addressing both storage and computation errors, and proposes solutions balancing performance, area, and coverage for different PiM technologies.

Contribution

It introduces new error correction approaches tailored for nonvolatile PiM, considering both memory and computation errors, with comprehensive analysis and guarantees.

Findings

All proposed solutions guarantee single error correction.

Analysis of performance-area-coverage trade-offs for different PiM technologies.

Survey of self-checking and homomorphic error correction methods.

Abstract

Processing in memory (PiM) represents a promising computing paradigm to enhance performance of numerous data-intensive applications. Variants performing computing directly in emerging nonvolatile memories can deliver very high energy efficiency. PiM architectures directly inherit the vulnerabilities of the underlying memory substrates, but they also are subject to errors due to the computation in place. Numerous well-established error correcting codes (ECC) for memory exist, and are also considered in the PiM context, however, they typically ignore errors that occur throughout computation. In this paper we revisit the error correction design space for nonvolatile PiM, considering both storage/memory and computation-induced errors, surveying several self-checking and homomorphic approaches. We propose several solutions and analyze their complex performance-area-coverage trade-off, using three representative nonvolatile PiM technologies. All of these solutions guarantee single error correction for both, bulk bitwise computations and ordinary memory/storage errors.