| Title |
An Optimal On-demand Scrubbing Solution for Read Disturbance Errors in Phase-change Memory |
| Authors |
(Moonsoo Kim) ; (Juhan Lee) ; (Hyun Kim) ; (Hyuk-Jae Lee) |
| DOI |
https://doi.org/10.5573/IEIESPC.2021.10.1.055 |
| Keywords |
Non-volatile memory; Phase-change memory; Read disturbance errors; On-demand scrubbing |
| Abstract |
Phase-change memory is a promising technology due to its attractive properties.
However, phase-change memory is difficult to commercialize because of its reliability issues. A read disturbance error, which is the main cause of reliability issues, occurs when a cell is repeatedly read. A conventional solution for read disturbance errors is periodically scrubbing the cells.
However, this method requires read counters to count the number of reads per word. This paper proposes an on-demand scrubbing solution that does not require read counters, which significantly reduces resource overhead. The proposed method observes the number of errors in a word using error-correcting code. If the number of errors is larger than a pre-defined threshold, scrubbing is performed to fix the errors. The proposed method removes nearly 1GB of hardware overhead required by read counters, and fixes more than 99.99% of read disturbance errors. |