Area-Efficient and Reliable Error Correcting Code Circuit Based on Hybrid CMOS/Memristor Circuit

Abstract

Resistive random-access memory (ReRAM) has several attractive features such as high storage density and high switching frequency with low power consumption. It is hence regarded as the most promising nonvolatile memory material. However, a memristor, which is a primitive component of the ReRAM-based memory, has much lower write endurance. Hence, an error-correcting code (ECC) circuit is indispensable for realizing reliable ReRAM storage. Accordingly, we propose a hybrid CMOS/memristor-based ECC circuit. In the proposed circuit, the blocks with high-frequency write operations are implemented using the conventional CMOS technology and the other blocks are implemented using the memristors to maintain a balance between the area overhead and reliability. Through numerical experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed ECC circuit achieves smaller area and higher reliability than the full memristor-based ECC circuits and achieves much smaller area while preserving the reliability compared with the full CMOS-based ECC circuits.