Design and Analysis of Energy-Efficient and Reliable 3-D ReRAM Cross-Point Array System

Abstract

In this paper, we study the energy, performance, and reliability of 3-D horizontal 1-selector-1-resistor (1S1R) cross-point resistive random access memory (ReRAM) systems. We present access schemes which activate multiple subarrays with multiple layers in a subarray to achieve high energy efficiency through activating fewer subarray and good reliability through innovative data organization. We propose two low-cost access schemes [namely, multilayer access scheme (MAS)-I and MAS-II] which enable multilayer programming but differ in the number of activated layers (NL) and hence differ in energy efficiency. To improve reliability, we propose to distribute data across subarrays as well as along the layers of a subarray such that the error characteristics of all accessed data lines are the same. At the system level, we use Bose–Chaudhuri–Hocquenghem (BCH) codes with different strengths so that all competing systems have the same reliability. We show that for a 1-GB 3-D horizontal 1S1R ReRAM system with an I/O width of 64 bits, the NB = 16, NL = 4 system based on MAS-I that utilizes BCH $t = 6$ code consumes the lowest energy with 33% lower energy consumption compared to the baseline system where only one layer is activated at a time.