论文标题

TA-LRW:降低stt-MRAM缓存错误率的替代政策

TA-LRW: A Replacement Policy for Error Rate Reduction in STT-MRAM Caches

论文作者

Cheshmikhani, Elham, Farbeh, Hamed, Miremadi, Seyed Ghassem, Asadi, Hossein

论文摘要

随着技术流程节点的缩小,由于其可扩展性低,泄漏功率高以及软误差率的增加,因此片上SRAM缓存失去了效率。在新兴记忆技术中,自旋转移扭矩磁性RAM(STT-MRAM)被称为基于SRAM基于SRAM的高速缓存记忆的最有希望的替代品。 STT-MRAM的主要优点是其非挥发性,接近零的泄漏功率,更高的密度,软错误的免疫力和更高的可扩展性。尽管有这些优势,但由于保留失败,写入失败和阅读干扰而导致的Stt-MRAM细胞的高错误率威胁到基于STT-MRAM技术的高速缓存记忆的可靠性。在较高温度下,错误率显着提高,这进一步影响了基于STT-MRAM的缓存记忆的可靠性。 STT-MRAM缓存记忆中热量产生和温度升高的主要来源是写操作,这些操作由缓存替代政策管理。在本文中,我们首先分析常规LRU替换策略中的缓存行为,并证明大多数连续写操作(超过66%)致力于相邻的缓存块。这些相邻的写操作导致累积热量和温度升高,从而大大提高了缓存错误率。为了消除热量积累和连续写入的邻接性,我们提出了一种名为“热意见最不明”(TA-LRW)的缓存替换策略(TA-LRW),以通过在遥远的高速缓存块中进行连续的写入操作来平滑地分布生成的热量。 TA-LRW保证在8路关联缓存中至少两个连续的写入操作的距离至少三个块。与常规LRU策略相比,这种遥远的写入方案平均将温度引起的错误率降低了94.8%,这导致缓存错误率降低了6.9倍。

As technology process node scales down, on-chip SRAM caches lose their efficiency because of their low scalability, high leakage power, and increasing rate of soft errors. Among emerging memory technologies, Spin-Transfer Torque Magnetic RAM (STT-MRAM) is known as the most promising replacement for SRAM-based cache memories. The main advantages of STT-MRAM are its non-volatility, near-zero leakage power, higher density, soft-error immunity, and higher scalability. Despite these advantages, the high error rate in STT-MRAM cells due to retention failure, write failure, and read disturbance threatens the reliability of cache memories built upon STT-MRAM technology. The error rate is significantly increased in higher temperatures, which further affects the reliability of STT-MRAM-based cache memories. The major source of heat generation and temperature increase in STT-MRAM cache memories is write operations, which are managed by cache replacement policy. In this paper, we first analyze the cache behavior in the conventional LRU replacement policy and demonstrate that the majority of consecutive write operations (more than 66%) are committed to adjacent cache blocks. These adjacent write operations cause accumulated heat and increased temperature, which significantly increases the cache error rate. To eliminate heat accumulation and the adjacency of consecutive writes, we propose a cache replacement policy, named Thermal-Aware Least-Recently Written (TA-LRW), to smoothly distribute the generated heat by conducting consecutive write operations in distant cache blocks. TA-LRW guarantees the distance of at least three blocks for each two consecutive write operations in an 8-way associative cache. This distant write scheme reduces the temperature-induced error rate by 94.8%, on average, compared with the conventional LRU policy, which results in 6.9x reduction in cache error rate.

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