Improving the Error Behavior of DRAM by Exploiting its Z-Channel Property

Kira Kraft^1,a, Chirag Sudarshan^1,b, Deepak M. Mathew^1,c, Christian Weis^1,d, Norbert Wehn^1,e and Matthias Jung^2
1Christian Weis, Norbert Wehn University of Kaiserslautern Kaiserslautern, Germany
^akraft@eit.uni-kl.de
^bsudarshan@eit.uni-kl.de
^cdeepak@eit.uni-kl.de
^dweis@eit.uni-kl.de
^ewehn@eit.uni-kl.de
²Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE) Kaiserslautern, Germany
matthias.jung@iese.fraunhofer.de

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we present a new communication theoretic channel model for Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) retention errors, that relies on the fully asymmetric retention error behavior of DRAM cells. This new model shows that the traditional approach is over pessimistic and we confirm this with real measurements of DDR3 and DDR4 DRAM devices. Together with an exploitation of the vendor specific true‐ and anti‐cell structure, a low complexity bit‐flipping approach is presented, that can largely increase DRAM's reliability with minimum overhead.

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