Sciweavers

SC
2009
ACM

Flexible cache error protection using an ECC FIFO

13 years 10 months ago
Flexible cache error protection using an ECC FIFO
We present ECC FIFO, a mechanism enabling two-tiered last-level cache error protection using an arbitrarily strong tier-2 code without increasing on-chip storage. Instead of adding redundant ECC information to each cache line, our ECC FIFO mechanism off-loads the extra information to off-chip DRAM. We augment each cache line with a tier1 code, which provides error detection consuming limited resources. The redundancy required for strong protection is provided by a tier-2 code placed in off-chip memory. Because errors that require tier-2 correction are rare, the overhead of accessing DRAM is unimportant. We show how this method can save 15 − 25% and 10 − 17% of on-chip cache area and power respectively while minimally impacting performance, which decreases by 1% on average across a range of scientific and consumer benchmarks. Categories and Subject Descriptors B.3.2 [Memory Structures]: Design Styles—Cache memories; B.3.4 [Memory Structures]: Reliability, Testing and Fault-To...
Doe Hyun Yoon, Mattan Erez
Added 19 May 2010
Updated 19 May 2010
Type Conference
Year 2009
Where SC
Authors Doe Hyun Yoon, Mattan Erez
Comments (0)