There are several emerging memory technologies looming on the horizon to compensate the physical scaling challenges of DRAM. Phase change memory (PCM) is one such candidate proposed for being part of the main memory in computing systems. One salient feature of PCM is its multi-level-cell (MLC) property, which can be used to multiply the memory capacity at the cell level. However, due to the nature of PCM that the value written to the cell can drift over time, PCM is prone to a unique type of soft errors, posing a great challenge for their practical deployment. This paper first quantitatively studied the current art for MLC PCM in dealing with the resistance drift problem and showed that the previously proposed techniques such as scrubbing or error correction mechanisms have significant reliability challenges to overcome. We then propose tri-level-cell PCM and demonstrate its ability to achieving 105 x lower soft error rate than four-level-cell PCM and 1.33 x higher information density than single-level-cell PCM. According to our findings, the tri-level-cell PCM shows 36.4% performance improvement over the four-level-cell PCM while achieving the soft error rate of DRAM.

As scaling DRAM cells becomes more challenging and energy-efficient DRAM chips are in high demand, the DRAM industry has started to undertake an alternative approach to address these looming issues-that is, to vertically stack DRAM dies with through-silicon-vias (TSVs) using 3-D-IC technology. Furthermore, this emerging integration technology also makes heterogeneous die stacking in one DRAM package possible. Such a heterogeneous DRAM chip provides a unique, promising opportunity for computer architects to contemplate a new memory hierarchy for future system design. In this paper, we study how to design such a heterogeneous DRAM chip for improving both performance and energy efficiency. In particular, we found that, if we want to design an SRAM row cache in a DRAM chip, simple stacking alone cannot address the majority of traditional SRAM row cache design issues. In this paper, to address these issues, we propose a novel floorplan and several architectural techniques that fully exploit the benefits of 3-D stacking technology. Our multi-core simulation results with memory-intensive applications suggest that, by tightly integrating a small row cache with its corresponding DRAM array, we can improve performance by 30% while saving dynamic energy by 31%.

Memory bandwidth has become a major performance bottleneck as more and more cores are integrated onto a single die, demanding more and more data from the system memory. Several prior studies have demonstrated that this memory bandwidth problem can be addressed by employing a 3D-stacked memory architecture, which provides a wide, high frequency memory-bus interface. Although previous 3D proposals already provide as much bandwidth as a traditional L2 cache can consume, the dense through-silicon-vias (TSVs) of 3D chip stacks can provide still more bandwidth. In this paper, we contest that we need to re-architect our memory hierarchy, including the L2 cache and DRAM interface, so that it can take full advantage of this massive bandwidth. Our technique, SMART-3D, is a new 3D-stacked memory architecture with a vertical L2 fetch/write-back network using a large array of TSVs. Simply stated, we leverage the TSV bandwidth to hide latency behind very large data transfers. We analyze the design trade-offs for the DRAM arrays, careful enough to avoid compromising the DRAM density because of TSV placement. Moreover, we propose an efficient mechanism to manage the false sharing problem when implementing SMART-3D in a multi-socket system. For single-threaded memory-intensive applications, the SMART-3D architecture achieves speedups from 1.53 to 2.14 over planar designs and from 1.27 to 1.72 over prior 3D designs. We achieve similar speedups for multi-program and multi-threaded workloads on multi-core and multi-socket processors. Furthermore, SMART-3D can even lower the energy consumption in the L2 cache and 3D DRAM for it reduces the total number of row buffer misses.

Phase change memory (PCM) is an emerging memory technology for future computing systems. Compared to other non-volatile memory alternatives, PCM is more matured to production, and has a faster read latency and potentially higher storage density. The main roadblock precluding PCM from being used, in particular, in the main memory hierarchy, is its limited write endurance. To address this issue, recent studies proposed to either reduce PCM's write frequency or use wear-leveling to evenly distribute writes. Although these techniques can extend the lifetime of PCM, most of them will not prevent deliberately designed malicious codes from wearing it out quickly. Furthermore, all the prior techniques did not consider the circumstances of a compromised OS and its security implication to the overall PCM design. A compromised OS will allow adversaries to manipulate processes and exploit side channels to accelerate wear-out.

As technology scaling poses a threat to DRAM scaling due to physical limitations such as limited charge, alternative memory technologies including several emerging non-volatile memories are being explored as possible DRAM replacements. One main roadblock for wider adoption of these new memories is the limited write endurance, which leads to wear-out related permanent failures. Furthermore, technology scaling increases the variation in cell lifetime resulting in early failures of many cells. Existing error correcting techniques are primarily devised for recovering from transient faults and are not suitable for recovering from permanent stuck-at faults, which tend to increase gradually with repeated write cycles. In this paper, we propose SAFER, a novel hardware-efficient multi-bit stuck-at fault error recovery scheme for resistive memories, which can function in conjunction with existing wear-leveling techniques. SAFER exploits the key attribute that a failed cell with a stuck-at value is still readable, making it possible to continue to use the failed cell to store data, thereby reducing the hardware overhead for error recovery. SAFER partitions a data block dynamically while ensuring that there is at most one fail bit per partition and uses single error correction techniques per partition for fail recovery. SAFER increases the number of recoverable fails and achieves better lifetime improvement with smaller hardware overhead relative to recently proposed Error Correcting Pointers and even ideal hamming coding scheme.