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Memory reliability for cells with strong bit-coupling interference

Published: 02 October 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Emerging memory technologies are offering unprecedented storage densities, alongside significant new reliability issues. One such issue this paper addresses is inter-cell interference between coupled pairs of cells. In the studied model there is strong interference between cells, in the sense that programming one cell to a high level changes the level of a second cell significantly. The particular type of interference we study is pair-wise coupling interference: where interference happens between disjoint pairs of cells, so every cell is affected by exactly one other cell.
Our results show that strong coupling interference can be effectively mitigated without need to add large amounts of redundancy beyond the simple Hamming codes common in low-latency memories. One of our techniques is using a soft decoder that can correct many more error combinations thanks to its knowledge of the interference model and parameters. Another technique introduces controlled intentional coupling between the cells at the write path, such that the undesired coupling can be neutralized at the read path with a clever choice of read levels. Overall the two schemes show promising reliability results compared to using the accepted read/write and decoding schemes. The schemes are applicable to a very general class of memories, and thus can help in the deployment of extremely dense emerging storage-class memory technologies that suffer from poor isolation between cells.

References

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cover image ACM Other conferences
MEMSYS '17: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Memory Systems
October 2017
409 pages
ISBN:9781450353359
DOI:10.1145/3132402
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 02 October 2017

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Author Tags

  1. coupling interference
  2. inter-cell interference
  3. non-volatile memory
  4. soft decoding
  5. storage-class memories

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