Wear-out analysis of Error Correction Techniques in Phase-Change Memory

Phase-Change Memory (PCM) is new memory technology and a possible replacement for DRAM, whose scaling limitations require new lithography technologies. Despite being promising, PCM has limited endurance (its cells withstand roughly 10⁸ bit-flips before failing), which prompted the adoption of Error Correction Techniques (ECTs). However, previous lifetime analyses of ECTs did not consider the difference between the bit-flip frequencies of data and code bits, which may lead to inaccurate wear-out analyses for the ECTs. In this work, we improve the wear-out analysis of PCM by modeling and analyzing the bit-flip probabilities of five ECTs. Our models also enable an accurate estimation of energy consumption and analysis of the endurance-energy trade-off for each ECT.