An offline frequent value encoding for energy-efficient MLC/TLC non-volatile memories

Abstract

This paper describes a low overhead, offline frequent value encoding (FVE) solution to reduce the write energy in multi-level/triple-level cell (MLC/TLC) non-volatile memories (NVMs). The proposed solution, which does not require any runtime software support, clusters a set of general-purpose applications according to their data frequency profiles and generates a dedicated offline FVE that minimizes write energy for each cluster. Results show that the write energy reduction of evaluation sets - using FVEs generated for training sets - are close (equal) to the best known solution for MLC (TLC) NVM encoding; however, our solution incurs a memory overhead that is 16× (5.7×) less than the best comparable scheme in the literature for MLC (TLC) NVMs.