Multi-stage BCH decoder to mitigate hotspot-induced bit error variation

3D heterogeneous integration (commonly termed as 3DIC) of CPU, GPU and DRAM dies vertically interconnected by a massive number of TSVs (Through-Silicon Vias) is expected to overcome limited bandwidth, high latency and energy consumption of off-chip DRAM. However, spatial and temporal variability in temperature (i.e., hotspots) is anticipated to result in bit error variation in DRAM die. A novel multi-stage BCH decoder has been proposed to efficiently address this issue in this work. The proposed multi-stage BCH decoder is designed to tolerate upto a certain maximum number of error bits per codeword, which is estimated from the on-line thermal gradient data, to minimize the decoding latency.