Sneak Path Interference-Aware Adaptive Detection and Decoding for Resistive Memory Arrays

TL;DR

This paper introduces an adaptive detection and decoding scheme for ReRAM arrays that accounts for sneak path interference, improving data recovery performance through a novel channel model and array-specific quantizer design.

Contribution

It proposes a new quantized channel model for ReRAM, along with array-level and column-level SPI-aware adaptive detection and decoding methods that outperform existing approaches.

Findings

Approaching ideal performance with only three quantization bits.

Array-level scheme outperforms the non-adaptive approach.

Column-level scheme further improves detection accuracy.

Abstract

Resistive random-access memory (ReRAM) is an emerging non-volatile memory technology for high-density and high-speed data storage. However, the sneak path interference (SPI) occurred in the ReRAM crossbar array seriously affects its data recovery performance. In this letter, we first propose a quantized channel model of ReRAM, based on which we design both the one-bit and multi-bit channel quantizers by maximizing the mutual information of the channel. A key channel parameter that affects the quantizer design is the sneak path occurrence probability (SPOP) of the memory cell. We first use the average SPOP calculated statistically to design the quantizer, which leads to the same channel detector for different memory arrays. We then adopt the SPOP estimated separately for each memory array for the quantizer design, which is generated by an effective channel estimator and through an iterative detection and decoding scheme for the ReRAM channel. This results in an array-level SPI-aware adaptive detection and decoding approach. Moreover, since there is a strong correlation of the SPI that affects memory cells in the same rows/columns than that affecting cells in different rows/columns, we further derive a column-level scheme which outperforms the array-level scheme. We also propose a channel decomposition method that enables effective ways for theoretically analyzing the ReRAM channel. Simulation results show that the proposed SPI-aware adaptive detection and decoding schemes can approach the ideal performance with three quantization bits, with only one decoding iteration.