Redundant Memory Array Architecture for Efficient Selective Protection

Abstract

Memory hardware errors may result from transient particle-induced faults as well as device defects due to aging. These errors are an important threat to computer system reliability as VLSI technologies continue to scale. Managing memory hardware errors is a critical component in developing an overall system dependability strategy. Memory error detection and correction are supported in a range of available hardware mechanisms. However, memory protections (particularly the more advanced ones) come at substantial costs in performance and energy usage. Moreover, the protection mechanisms are often a fixed, system-wide choice and can not easily adapt to different protection demand of different applications or memory regions. In this paper, we present a new RAIM (redundant array of independent memory) design that compared to the state-of-the-art implementation can easily provide high protection capability and the ability to selectively protect a subset of the memory. A straightforward implementation of the design can incur a substantial memory traffic overhead. We propose a few practical optimizations to mitigate this overhead. With these optimizations the proposed RAIM design offers significant advantages over existing RAIM design at lower or comparable costs.