Spintronic domain-wall memories (DWMs) offer improved memory density and energy compared to conventional memories, but are susceptible to shifting faults. We propose PIETT (Pinning,Insertion,Erasure, andTranslation-faultTolerance) for improved misalignment correction versus the state of the art. PIETT proposes a derived error correction combined with multi-domain access approach to detect and correct a minimum of three misalignment faults after an arbitrary shift distance. Moreover, the rate of both misalignment and pinning faults are characterized in DWM nanowires, demonstrating that pinning faults are a significant concern to DWM. As such, PIETT is the first method to combine correction of misalignment and pinning faults in random access DWMs. It also introduces novel PIETT Transverse Access Points (TAPs), which utilize a novel write access mode that can set/reset multiple domains in a single intrinsic operation and can store shift distance detection codes. By allowing checks between shifts of the intrinsic shift distance (e.g., 3 domains), using a single TAP per nanowire expands misalignment protection and determines the needed corrective shifts to correct faults in all nanowires. Two TAPs expands misalignment protection to correct misalignment by more than one position and detects pinning by detecting different shift distances at each extremity of the nanowire. PIETT leverages knowledge of pinned nanowire locations to guide a modified SECDED ECC with one additional parity bit stored in additional parity nanowires. Thus, PIETT in TAP mode can correct unlimited, potentially multi-position, misalignment faults and either up to three pinning faults or up to two pinning faults with up to one bit flip fault using scrubbing. PIETT provides 8 to 21 orders of magnitude improvement in mean-time-to-failure with similar or better area overhead and only a 1% system performance degradation compared to state of the art DWM misalignment correction.

Recently, Phase-Change Memory (PCM) has become a popular commercialized non-volatile memory (NVM), which has been deployed as a backing memory for DRAM main memory, secondary storage, or even as a DRAM main memory replacement. Like other NVMs, PCM has asymmetric access energy; writes dominate reads. When considering multilevel cells (MLC), this asymmetry can vary by an order of magnitude. Many schemes have been developed to take advantage of the asymmetric patterns of ‘0’s and ‘1’s in the data to reduce write energy. Because the memory is non-volatile, data can be recovered via physical attack or across system reboot cycles. To protect information stored in PCM against these attacks requires encryption. Unfortunately, most encryption algorithms scramble ‘0’s and ‘1’s in the data, effectively removing any patterns and negatively impacting schemes that leverage data bias and similarity to reduce write energy. In this paper, we introduce Virtual Coset Coding (VCC) as a workload-independent approach that reduces costly symbol transitions for storing encrypted data. VCC is based on two ideas. First, using coset encoding with random coset candidates, it is possible to effectively reduce the frequency of costly bit/symbol transitions when writing encrypted data. Second, a small set of random substrings can be used to achieve the same encoding efficiency as a large number of random coset candidates, but at a much lower encoding/decoding cost. Additionally, we demonstrate how VCC can be leveraged for energy reduction in combination with fault-mitigation and fault-tolerance to dramatically increase the lifetimes of endurance-limited NVMs, such as PCM. We evaluate the design of VCC and demonstrate that it can be implemented on-chip with only a nominal area overhead. VCC reduces dynamic energy by 22-28% while maintaining the same performance. Using our multi-objective optimization approach achieves at least a 36% improvement in lifetime over the state-of-the-art and at least a 50% improvement in lifetime vs. an unencoded memory, while maintaining its energy savings and system performance.

The growth in data needs of modern applications has created significant challenges for modern systems leading to a “memory wall.” Spintronic Domain-Wall Memory (DWM), provides near-SRAM read/write performance, energy savings and non-volatility, potential for extremely high storage density, and does not have significant endurance limitations. However, DWM’s benefits cannot directly address data access latency and throughput limitations of memory bus bandwidth. Processing-inmemory (PIM) is a popular solution to reduce the demands of memory-to-processor communication by offloading computation directly to the memory. PIM has been proposed in multiple technologies including DRAM, Phase-change memory (PCM), resistive memory (ReRAM), and Spin-Transfer Torque Memory (STT-MRAM). DRAM PIM provides solutions for a restricted set of two operand bulk-bitwise operations. PIM in PCM and ReRAM raise concerns about their effective endurance and PIM in STT-MRAM has insufficient density for main-memory applications. We propose CORUSCANT, a DWM-based in-memory computing solution that leverages the properties of DWM nanowires and allows them to serve as polymorphic gates. While normally DWM is accessed by applying spin polarized currents orthogonal to the nanowire at access points to read individual bits, transverse access along the DWM nanowire allows the differentiation of the aggregate resistance of multiple bits in the nanowire, akin to a multi-level cell. CORUSCANT leverages this transverse reading to directly provide multi-operand bulk-bitwise logic. Leveraging this multi-operand concept enabled by transverse access, CORUSCANT provides techniques to conduct multi-operand addition and two operand multiplication much more efficiently than prior digital PIM solutions. CORUSCANT provides a 1.6 × speedup compared to the leading DRAM PIM technique for query applications that leverage bulk bitwise operations. Compared to the leading PIM technique for DWM, CORUSCANT improves performance by 6.9 ×, 2.3 × and energy by 5.5 ×, 3.4 × for 8-bit addition and multiplication, respectively. For arithmetic heavy benchmarks, CORUSCANT reduces access latency by 2.1 ×, while decreasing energy consumption by 25.2 × for a 10% area overhead versus non-PIM DWM.

Hyperdimensional computing (HDC) is an emerging computational framework inspired by the brain that operates on vectors with thousands of dimensions to emulate cognition. Unlike conventional computational frameworks that operate on numbers, HDC, like the brain, uses high-dimensional random vectors and is capable of one-shot learning. HDC is based on a well-defined set of arithmetic operations and is highly error resilient. The core operations of HDC manipulate HD vectors in bulk bit-wise fashion, offering many opportunities to leverage parallelism. Unfortunately, on conventional von Neumann architectures, the continuous movement of HD vectors among the processor and the memory can make the cognition task prohibitively slow and energy intensive. Hardware accelerators only marginally improve related metrics. In contrast, even partial implementations of an HDC framework inside memory can provide considerable performance/energy gains as demonstrated in prior work using memristors. This article presents an architecture based on racetrack memory (RTM) to conduct and accelerate the entire HDC framework within memory. The proposed solution requires minimal additional CMOS circuitry by leveraging a read operation across multiple domains in RTMs called transverse read (TR) to realize exclusive-or ( XOR ) and addition operations. To minimize the CMOS circuitry overhead, an RTM nanowire-based counting mechanism is proposed. Using language recognition as the example workload, the proposed RTM HDC system reduces the energy consumption by 8.6× compared to the state-of-the-art in-memory implementation. Compared to dedicated hardware design realized with an FPGA, RTM-based HDC processing demonstrates 7.8× and 5.3× improvements in the overall runtime and energy consumption, respectively.

Error correction and fault tolerance have become pivotal considerations as conventional memories scale and emerging memories come to market. The common thread in these reliability challenges is that deep scaling reveals outliers in the memory system, which are responsible for the vast majority of faults. These cells, which may be attributed to process variation or undetected fabrication defects, tend to be more vulnerable to various forms of crosstalk, read- and write-disturbance, and even radiation-induced faults. By tracking faults in memory cells, identifying the worst offenders, and mitigating their effects accordingly, we can design dramatically improved fault tolerance techniques that are tuned to the fault characteristics of the memory at hand. A critical piece is the development of scalable and fault tolerance registries to track and retain critical information about these faults. The fault registries must be able to function in the faulty memory they protect, operate efficiently at the cell/bit-level, and handle extreme fault rates. Using the knowledge of faulty locations, our fault tolerance techniques applied to conventional main memories like DRAM and endurance-limited memories like flash and phase-change memory improve reliability, endurance, and lifetime by orders of magnitude while maintaining performance and energy efficiency.

The use of hardware encryption and new memory technologies such as phase change memory (PCM) are gaining popularity in a variety of server applications such as cloud systems. While PCM provides energy and density advantages over conventional DRAM memory, it faces endurance challenges. Such challenges are exacerbated when employing memory encryption as the stored data is essentially randomized, losing data similarity and reducing or eliminating the effectiveness of energy and endurance oriented encoding techniques. This results in increasing dynamic energy consumption and accelerated wear out. In this article, we propose CASTLE, a technique for in-memory encryption to leverage this encryption process to improve reliability in the presence of endurance faults. We also propose TOWERs for CASTLE that improve reliability as well as energy for encrypted data through a novel application of compression and encoding. CASTLE and TOWERs are compatible with error-correction codes (ECC) and error correction pointers (ECP), the standard for mitigating endurance faults in PCM. When combining CASTLE and TOWERS, we achieve an average lifetime improvement of over 45× compared to SECDED ECC, 7.1× compared to SECRET, and 3.6× compared to the leading partition-and-flip fault-tolerance approach (AEGIS) for the same area overhead.

Scaling limitations of conventional and emerging memories has provided the impetus for the increased focus on reliability techniques to overcome associated physical limitations of non-perfect devices. However, despite these reliability advances, critical challenges remain to be solved as new memory types and memory vulnerabilities arise. There continues to be no simulator with extended reliability models for easy comparison of existing and newly developed techniques nor simple integration of innovative new reliability concepts and failure modes. The mission of our simulator, PremSim, is to provide a framework which solves these fundamental limitations. While PremSim can function using memory traces, it was also designed from the ground-up to be fully integrated with several external simulators including the Structural Simulation Toolkit (SST) as a memory backend. It can connect to other detailed memory backends such as DRAMSim2 for detailed energy and timing. Further, it provides modes which give estimated lifetime for endurance-limited memories, as well as the provable correction capability per row for a given fault distribution. To perform these calculations in a reasonable time window and to remain compatible with abstract full-system simulators, we also provide and verify novel abstractions. Additionally, we show case studies of how different fault mitigation strategies can be modeled effectively in PremSim including solutions at the page, row, word, and bit-level granularity of next-generation traditional and emerging faulty memories.