ROBIN: Incremental Oblique Interleaved ECC for Reliability Improvement in STT-MRAM Caches

TL;DR

This paper introduces ROBIN, an innovative ECC scheme designed to significantly enhance reliability in STT-MRAM caches by addressing data-dependent error patterns that undermine traditional ECC effectiveness.

Contribution

The paper proposes ROBIN, a novel incremental oblique interleaved ECC configuration that outperforms conventional ECCs in correcting data-dependent errors in STT-MRAM caches.

Findings

ROBIN reduces cache error rate by over 28.6 times.

Conventional ECCs increase error rate by 151.7%.

ROBIN effectively improves reliability in STT-MRAM caches.

Abstract

Spin-Transfer Torque Magnetic RAM} (STT-MRAM) is a promising alternative for SRAMs in on-chip cache memories. Besides all its advantages, high error rate in STT-MRAM is a major limiting factor for on-chip cache memories. In this paper, we first present a comprehensive analysis that reveals that the conventional Error-Correcting Codes (ECCs) lose their efficiency due to data-dependent error patterns, and then propose an efficient ECC configuration, so-called ROBIN, to improve the correction capability. The evaluations show that the inefficiency of conventional ECC increases the cache error rate by an average of 151.7% while ROBIN reduces this value by more than 28.6x.