Utilization of SECDED for soft error and variation-induced defect tolerance in caches

Combination of SECDED with a redundancy technique can effectively tolerate a high variation-induced defect rate in future processes. However, while a defective cell in a block can be repaired by SECDED, the block becomes vulnerable to soft errors. This paper proposes a technique to deal with the degraded resilience against soft errors. Only clean data can be stored in defective blocks of a cache. This constraint is enforced through selective write-through mechanism. An error occurring in a defective block can be detected and the correct data can be obtained from the lower level caches.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: DATE
• Authors: Luong Dinh Hung, Hidetsugu Irie, Masahiro Goshima, Shuichi Sakai
• Keywords: DATE 2007, Defective Block, Hardware, Soft Errors, Variation-induced Defect Rate