SEC-BADAEC: An Efficient ECC With No Vacancy for Strong Memory Protection

Abstract

Shrinking process technology and rising memory densities have made memories increasingly vulnerable to errors. Accordingly, DRAM vendors have introduced On-die Error Correction Code (O-ECC) to protect data against the growing number of errors. Current O-ECC provides weak Single Error Correction (SEC), but future memories will require stronger protection as error rates rise. This paper proposes a novel ECC, called Single Error Correction-Byte-Aligned Double Adjacent Error Correction (SEC-BADAEC), and its construction algorithm to improve memory reliability. SEC-BADAEC requires the same redundancy as SEC O-ECC, but it can also correct some frequent 2-bit error patterns. Our evaluation shows SEC-BADAEC can improve memory reliability by 23.5% and system-level reliability by 29.8% with negligible overheads.