Keynote speach

While designers have traditionally dealt with unreliable embedded memories through standard fault-tolerant techniques in the past, aggressive technology scaling and low-voltage operation (to save power) pose significant reliability challenges for distributed embedded memories. I briefly survey traditional hardware and software schemes for addressing reliability to achieve a low-power, fault-tolerant memory space, and keep production yield at tolerable levels. I then present strategies to virtualize the on-chip memory space to cope with the issues of low power, security, reliability and performance. I present the notions of Embedded Raids-on-Chip (E-RoC) and SPMVisor, holistic hardware/software solutions that virtualize the user memory space and which exploit unreliable distributed embedded memories for reduced power consumption, security, reliability and yield management.