Implicit-storing and redundant-encoding-of-attribute information in error-correction-codes

  • Authors:

  • Yiannakis Sazeides;Emre Özer;Danny Kershaw;Panagiota Nikolaou;Marios Kleanthous;Jaume Abella

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Cyprus;ARM;NXP;University of Cyprus;University of Cyprus;Barcelona Supercomputing Center

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 46th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

This paper proposes implicit-storing to extend the logical capacity of a memory array without increasing its physical capacity by leveraging the array's error-correction-codes to infer the implicitly stored bits. Implicit-storing is related to error-code-tagging, a technique that distinguishes between faults in data and invariant attributes of a location when the attributes are not stored in the memory array but are encoded in the error-correction-codes. Both error-code-tagging and implicit-storing cause a code-strength reduction due to their encoding of additional information in the code meant to only protect data. Redundant-encoding-of-attributes is introduced to improve the strength of a code by encoding same information in multiple codewords in a cache or memory. We demonstrate how EREA and IREA, two derivatives of redundant-encoding, alleviate the code-strength reduction experienced by error-code-tagging and implicit-storing respectively. Implementing the proposed methods requires minor modifications in the encoding and decoding logic of the baseline error-correction scheme used in this work. The paper discusses several uses of the proposed schemes to help demonstrate their usefulness.