Reliable On-Chip Memory Design for CMPs

Abstract

Aggressive technology scaling in deep sub micron regime makes chips more susceptible to failures. This causes multiple realibility challenges in the design of modern chips, including manufacturing defects, wear-out, and parametric variations. With increasing area occupied by different on-chip memories in modern computing platforms such as Chip Multi-Processors (CMPs), memory reliability becomes a challenging issue. Traditional on-chip memory reliability techniques (e.g., ECC) incur significant power and performance overheads. To tackle such challenges, my research introduces several designs for fault-tolerance of both L1 and L2 cache memories in uni-core processors [1], Last-level Cache (LLC) in CMPs [3][4], and LLC in Networks-on-Chip (NoCs) [2].