5.6 Analyzing and Improving Memories
Date: Wednesday 11 March 2015
Time: 08:30 - 10:00
Location / Room: Bayard
Chair:
Robert Aitken, ARM, US
Co-Chair:
Panagiota Papavramidou, IMAG, FR
Memories are a driving force behind virtually all IC designs. This session describes methods of improving memory architecture, robustness, and lifetime.
| Time | Label | Presentation Title Authors |
|---|---|---|
| 08:30 | 5.6.1 | ON THE STATISTICAL MEMORY ARCHITECTURE EXPLORATION AND OPTIMIZATION Speakers: Charalampos Antoniadis1, Georgios Karakonstantis2, Nestoras Evmorfopoulos1, Andreas Burg3 and George Stamoulis1 1University of Thessaly, GR; 2Queen's University, GB; 3École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), CH Abstract The worsening of process variations and the consequent increased spreads in circuit performance and consumed power hinder the satisfaction of the targeted budgets and lead to yield loss. Corner based design and adoption of design guardbands might limit the yield loss. However, in many cases such methods may not be able to capture the real effects which might be way better than the predicted ones leading to increasingly pessimistic designs. The situation is even more severe in memories which consist of substantially different individual building blocks, further complicating the accurate analysis of the impact of variations at the architecture level leaving many potential issues uncovered and opportunities unexploited. In this paper, we develop a framework for capturing non-trivial statistical interactions among all the components of a memory/cache. The developed tool is able to find the optimum memory/cache configuration under various constraints allowing the designers to make the right choices early in the design cycle and consequently improve performance, energy, and especially yield. Our, results indicate that the consideration of the architectural interactions between the memory components allow to relax the pessimistic access times that are predicted by existing techniques. Download Paper (PDF; Only available from the DATE venue WiFi) |
| 09:00 | 5.6.2 | ECRIPSE: AN EFFICIENT METHOD FOR CALCULATING RTN-INDUCED FAILURE PROBABILITY OF AN SRAM CELL Speakers: Hiromitsu Awano, Masayuki Hiromoto and Takashi Sato, Kyoto University, JP Abstract Failure rate degradation of an SRAM cell due to random telegraph noise (RTN) is calculated for the first time. ECRIPSE, an efficient method for calculating the RTN-induced failure probability of an SRAM cell, has been developed to exhaustively cover a large number of possible bias-voltage combinations on which RTN statistics strongly depend. In order to shorten computational time, the Monte Carlo calculation of a single gate-bias condition is accelerated by incorporating two techniques: 1) construction of an optimal importance sampling using particles that move about the ``important'' regions in a variability space, and 2) a classifier that quickly judges whether the random samples are in failure regions or not. We show that the proposed method achieves at least 15.6x speed-up over the state-of-the-art method. We then integrate an RTN model to modulate failure probability. In our experiment, RTN worsens failure probability by six times than that calculated without the effect of RTN. Download Paper (PDF; Only available from the DATE venue WiFi) |
| 09:30 | 5.6.3 | SUBPAGE PROGRAMMING FOR EXTENDING THE LIFETIME OF NAND FLASH MEMORY Speakers: Jung-Hoon Kim1, Sang-Hoon Kim2 and Jin-Soo Kim3 1Samsung Electronics Corp., KR; 2KAIST, KR; 3Sungkyunkwan University, KR Abstract During the past decade, the density of NAND flash memory has been increased in many folds. The increase has been driven by storing multiple bits in a cell and scaling down the fabrication process. Such advance in manufacturing technology, however, has been significantly impaired the reliability of the flash memory so that the reliability becomes one of the major concerns in use of the flash memory. Moreover, as the flash memory writes data in the unit of flash page, the trend of the increase in page size worsens the reliability by amplifying a small update to a full flash page programming. In this paper, we propose a new programming method to improve the flash endurance cycle, especially when a small amount of data are written repeatedly. Proposed method so called "subpage programming" partitions a page into smaller subpages. A small amount of data can be programmed to one of the subpages while the other subpages are inhibited from the programming by leveraging the mechanisms of flash cell programming. Thus, the number of flash cells that undergo programming is minimized. We evaluated the effect of the proposed subpage programming on real NAND flash memory chips from three different manufacturers. Our evaluation results show that the subpage programming improves the flash endurance cycle by up to 258%. Download Paper (PDF; Only available from the DATE venue WiFi) |
| 10:00 | End of session Coffee Break in Exhibition Area Coffee Break in Exhibition AreaOn all conference days (Tuesday to Thursday), coffee and tea will be served during the coffee breaks at the below-mentioned times in the exhibition area. Lunch BreakOn Tuesday and Wednesday, lunch boxes will be served in front of the session room Salle Oisans and in the exhibition area for fully registered delegates (a voucher will be given upon registration on-site). On Thursday, lunch will be served in Room Les Ecrins (for fully registered conference delegates only). Tuesday, March 10, 2015Coffee Break 10:30 - 11:30 Lunch Break 13:00 - 14:30; Keynote session from 13:20 - 14:20 (Room Oisans) sponsored by Mentor Graphics Coffee Break 16:00 - 17:00 Wednesday, March 11, 2015Coffee Break 10:00 - 11:00 Lunch Break 12:30 - 14:30, Keynote lectures from 12:50 - 14:20 (Room Oisans) Coffee Break 16:00 - 17:00 Thursday, March 12, 2015Coffee Break 10:00 - 11:00 Lunch Break 12:30 - 14:00, Keynote lecture from 13:20 - 13:50 Coffee Break 15:30 - 16:00 |
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