research-article

Enhancing lifetime and security of PCM-based main memory with start-gap wear leveling

Authors:

Moinuddin K. Qureshi,

Michele Franceschini,

Vijayalakshmi Srinivasan,

Bulent AbaliAuthors Info & Claims

MICRO 42: Proceedings of the 42nd Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture

Pages 14 - 23

https://doi.org/10.1145/1669112.1669117

Published: 12 December 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Phase Change Memory (PCM) is an emerging memory technology that can increase main memory capacity in a cost-effective and power-efficient manner. However, PCM cells can endure only a maximum of 10⁷ - 10⁸ writes, making a PCM based system have a lifetime of only a few years under ideal conditions. Furthermore, we show that non-uniformity in writes to different cells reduces the achievable lifetime of PCM system by 20x. Writes to PCM cells can be made uniform with Wear-Leveling. Unfortunately, existing wear-leveling techniques require large storage tables and indirection, resulting in significant area and latency overheads.

We propose Start-Gap, a simple, novel, and effective wear-leveling technique that uses only two registers. By combining Start-Gap with simple address-space randomization techniques we show that the achievable lifetime of the baseline 16GB PCM-based system is boosted from 5% (with no wear-leveling) to 97% of the theoretical maximum, while incurring a total storage overhead of less than 13 bytes and obviating the latency overhead of accessing large tables.

We also analyze the security vulnerabilities for memory systems that have limited write endurance, showing that under adversarial settings, a PCM-based system can fail in less than one minute. We provide a simple extension to Start-Gap that makes PCM-based systems robust to such malicious attacks.

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Cited By

Nath AKapoor H(2024)AmLuCEP: Amalgamating LUT-based Compression and Adaptive Encoding Assisted Block Placement To Improve Lifetime of PCM-based Main MemoriesACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems10.1145/368933429:6(1-24)Online publication date: 20-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3689334
Singh DYeung D(2024)MORSE: Memory Overwrite Time Guided Soft Writes to Improve ReRAM Energy and EnduranceProceedings of the 2024 International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques10.1145/3656019.3676890(26-39)Online publication date: 14-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3656019.3676890
Xu WKoren I(2024)A Scalable Wear Leveling Technique for Phase Change MemoryACM Transactions on Storage10.1145/363114620:1(1-26)Online publication date: 30-Jan-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3631146
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Enhancing lifetime and security of PCM-based main memory with start-gap wear leveling
1. Hardware
  1. Integrated circuits
    1. Semiconductor memory

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cover image ACM Conferences

MICRO 42: Proceedings of the 42nd Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture

December 2009

601 pages

ISBN:9781605587981

DOI:10.1145/1669112

General Chairs:
David Albonesi
Cornell
,
Margaret Martonosi
Princeton
,
Program Chairs:
David August
Princeton/Parakinetics
,
José Martínez
Cornell

Copyright © 2009 ACM.

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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Published: 12 December 2009

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Micro-42: The 42nd Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture

December 12 - 16, 2009

New York, New York

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Cited By

Nath AKapoor H(2024)AmLuCEP: Amalgamating LUT-based Compression and Adaptive Encoding Assisted Block Placement To Improve Lifetime of PCM-based Main MemoriesACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems10.1145/368933429:6(1-24)Online publication date: 20-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3689334
Singh DYeung D(2024)MORSE: Memory Overwrite Time Guided Soft Writes to Improve ReRAM Energy and EnduranceProceedings of the 2024 International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques10.1145/3656019.3676890(26-39)Online publication date: 14-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3656019.3676890
Xu WKoren I(2024)A Scalable Wear Leveling Technique for Phase Change MemoryACM Transactions on Storage10.1145/363114620:1(1-26)Online publication date: 30-Jan-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3631146
Saxena AMathur SQureshi MTsafrir DMusuvathi MGupta RAbu-Ghazaleh N(2024)Rubix: Reducing the Overhead of Secure Rowhammer Mitigations via Randomized Line-to-Row MappingProceedings of the 29th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, Volume 210.1145/3620665.3640404(1014-1028)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3620665.3640404
Ye CChen MJiang QWang C(2024)Hercules: Enabling Atomic Durability for Persistent Memory with Transient Persistence DomainACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems10.1145/360747323:6(1-34)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3607473
Liu HJin XYe CLiao XJin HZhang Y(2024)I/O Causality Based In-Line Data Deduplication for Non-Volatile Memory Enabled Storage SystemsIEEE Transactions on Computers10.1109/TC.2024.336596173:5(1327-1340)Online publication date: May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TC.2024.3365961
Zhou HWu BCheng HLiu JLei TFeng DTong W(2024)DRCTL: A Disorder-Resistant Computation Translation Layer Enhancing the Lifetime and Performance of Memristive CIM Architecture2024 57th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO)10.1109/MICRO61859.2024.00028(263-277)Online publication date: 2-Nov-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/MICRO61859.2024.00028
Zeng JZhang TJung C(2024)Compiler-Directed Whole-System Persistence2024 ACM/IEEE 51st Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA)10.1109/ISCA59077.2024.00074(961-977)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ISCA59077.2024.00074
Xu QJiang QWang C(2024)CaitiJournal of Systems Architecture: the EUROMICRO Journal10.1016/j.sysarc.2024.103109150:COnline publication date: 1-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.sysarc.2024.103109
Jia MSha EZhuge QXu R(2024)Ensuring consistent recovery under power failure with minimal NVM write overheadJournal of Systems Architecture10.1016/j.sysarc.2024.103083148(103083)Online publication date: Mar-2024
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