WELCOMF

Abstract

Emerging Non-Volatile memories such as Phase Change Memory (PCM) and Resistive RAM are projected as potential replacements of the traditional DRAM-based main memories. However, limited write endurance and high write energy limit their chances of adoption as a mainstream main memory standard. In this paper, we propose a word-level compression scheme called COMF to reduce bitflips in PCMs by removing the most repeated words from the cache lines before writing into memory. Later, we also propose an intra-line wear leveing technique called WELCOMF that extends COMF to improve lifetime. Experimental results show that the proposed technique improves lifetime by 75% and, reduce bit flips and energy by 45% and 46% respectively over baseline.