WiSE: When Learning Assists Resolving STT-MRAM Efficiency ChallengesShow others and affiliations
2023 (English)In: IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing, E-ISSN 2168-6750, Vol. 11, no 1, p. 43-55Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]
Spin Transfer Torque Magnetic RAM (STT-MRAM) is one of the most promising on-chip technologies, which delivers high density, non-volatility, and near-zero leakage power. However, STT-MRAM suffers from three reliability issues, namely, read disturbance, write failure, and retention failure, that present significant challenges to its use as a reliable on-chip memory. All of these three reliability challenges become even more threatening with any increase in STT-MRAM cell temperature. Write operations are regarded as the main source of heat generation and temperature increase in STT-MRAM on-chip memories. This paper first presents experiments to show how the heat generated by consecutive writes affects the reliability of an STT-MRAM on-chip cache. Then, it proposes the WiSE framework, an approach to reduce the STT-MRAM-based cache memory temperature and improve its reliability. WiSE utilizes the Reinforcement Learning (RL) technique to detect high-density write operation patterns in STT-MRAM cache. To manage the write operations across the STT-MRAM caches, WiSE introduces a new temperature-aware replacement policy. The simulation results show that while WiSE imposes only about 1% performance overhead, it improves retention failure rate, read disturbance rate and write failure rate by 64%, 57%, and 47%, respectively, compared to Least Recently Used (LRU) replacement policy. (c) IEEE
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Piscataway, NJ: IEEE, 2023. Vol. 11, no 1, p. 43-55
Keywords [en]
Cache memory, Heat Accumulation F, Heating systems, Magnetic tunneling, Reinforcement Learning, Reliability, Reliability, Replacement Policy, Resistance, STT-MRAM, System-on-chip, Thermal stability
National Category
Condensed Matter Physics
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:hh:diva-46749DOI: 10.1109/TETC.2022.3163438ISI: 000970352500004Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85127783951OAI: oai:DiVA.org:hh-46749DiVA, id: diva2:1655773
2022-05-032022-05-032025-10-01Bibliographically approved