CORIDOR: Using CO herence and Tempo R al Local I ty to Mitigate Read D isurbance Err OR in STT-RAM Caches

Abstract

In the deep sub-micron region, “spin-transfer torque RAM” (STT-RAM ) suffers from “read-disturbance error” (RDE) , whereby a read operation disturbs the stored data. Mitigation of RDE requires restore operations, which imposes latency and energy penalties. Hence, RDE presents a crucial threat to the scaling of STT-RAM. In this paper, we offer three techniques to reduce the restore overhead. First, we avoid the restore operations for those reads, where the block will get updated at a higher level cache in the near future. Second, we identify read-intensive blocks using a lightweight mechanism and then migrate these blocks to a small SRAM buffer. On a future read to these blocks, the restore operation is avoided. Third, for data blocks having zero value, a write operation is avoided, and only a flag is set. Based on this flag, both read and restore operations to this block are avoided. We combine these three techniques to design our final policy, named CORIDOR. Compared to a baseline policy, which performs restore operation after each read, CORIDOR achieves a 31.6% reduction in total energy and brings the relative CPI (cycle-per-instruction) to 0.64×. By contrast, an ideal RDE-free STT-RAM saves 42.7% energy and brings the relative CPI to 0.62×. Thus, our CORIDOR policy achieves nearly the same performance as an ideal RDE-free STT-RAM cache. Also, it reaches three-fourths of the energy-saving achieved by the ideal RDE-free cache. We also compare CORIDOR with four previous techniques and show that CORIDOR provides higher restore energy savings than these techniques.