Selectively protecting error-correcting code for area-efficient and reliable STT-RAM caches

Recent researches on STT-RAM revealed that device scaling makes its write operations unreliable. To mitigate the impact of this problem, this paper proposes a low-cost, ECC-based solution for STT-RAM caches. In particular, it proposes to share storage for ECC among different blocks within a set and to use them only for unsuccessful write operations. Experimental results show that our scheme reduces 74% to 98% of area overhead incurred by the conventional per-block ECC while maintaining system performance and reliability.