Sanitizer: Mitigating the Impact of Expensive ECC Checks on STT-MRAM based Main Memories

DRAM density scaling has become increasingly difficult due to challenges in maintaining a sufficiently high storage capacitance and a sufficiently low leakage current at nanoscale feature sizes. Non-volatile memories (NVMs) have drawn significant attention as potential DRAM replacements because they represent information using resistance rather than electrical charge. Spin-torque transfer magnetoresistive RAM (STT-MRAM) is one of the most promising NVM technologies due to its relatively low write energy, high speed, and high endurance. However, STT-MRAM suffers from its own scaling problems. As the size of the storage element decreases with technology scaling, STT-MRAM retention error rates are expected to increase, which will require multi-bit error-correcting code (ECC) and periodic scrubbing. We introduce the Sanitizer architecture, which mitigates the performance and energy overheads of ECC and scrubbing in future STT-MRAM based main memories. To reduce the scrubbing rate, a coarse-grained, multi-bit ECC mechanism with a 12.5% storage overhead is used. To avoid fetching multiple blocks from memory and performing costly ECC checks on every read, the memory regions that will likely be accessed in the near future are predicted and proactively scrubbed. Compared to a conventional STT-MRAM system, Sanitizer improves performance by 1.22× and reduces end-to-end system energy by 22%.