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Racetrack memory is an exciting emerging memory technology with the potential to offer far greater capacity and performance than other non-volatile memories. Racetrack memory has an unusual error model, though, which precludes the use of the typical error coding techniques used by architects. In this paper, we introduce GreenFlag, a coding scheme that combines a new construction for Varshamov-Tenegolts codes with specially crafted delimiter bits that are placed between each codeword. GreenFlag is the first coding scheme that is compatible with 3D racetrack, which has the benefit of very high density but the limitation of a single read/write port per track. Based on our implementation of encoding/decoding hardware, we analyze the trade-offs between latency, code length, and code rate; we then use this analysis to evaluate the viability of racetrack at each level of the memory hierarchy.
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Foosball Coding: Correcting Shift Errors and Bit Flip Errors in 3D Racetrack Memory
Racetrack memory is a promising new non-volatile memory technology, especially because of the density of its 3D implementation. However, for 3D racetrack to reach its potential, certain reliability issues must be overcome. Prior work used per-track encoding to tolerate the shift errors that are unique to racetrack, but no solutions existed for tolerating both shift errors and bit flip errors. We introduce Foosball Coding, which combines per-track coding for shift errors with a novel across-track coding for bit flips. Moreover, our per-track coding scheme methodically explores the design of inter-codeword delimiters and introduces the novel concept of multi-purpose delimiters, in which the existence of multiple delimiter options can be used to provide additional information.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1717602
- PAR ID:
- 10191423
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 50th IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN 2020)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 331 to 342
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/DSN48063.2020.00049
