3RSeT: Read Disturbance Rate Reduction in STT-MRAM Caches by Selective Tag Comparison

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Main Authors: Cheshmikhani, Elham, Farbeh, Hamed, Asad, Hossein
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Cheshmikhani, Elham
Farbeh, Hamed
Asad, Hossein
author_facet Cheshmikhani, Elham
Farbeh, Hamed
Asad, Hossein
contents Recent development in memory technologies has introduced Spin-Transfer Torque Magnetic RAM (STT-MRAM) as the most promising replacement for SRAMs in on-chip cache memories. Besides its lower leakage power, higher density, immunity to radiation-induced particles, and non-volatility, an unintentional bit flip during read operation, referred to as read disturbance error, is a severe reliability challenge in STT-MRAM caches. One major source of read disturbance error in STT-MRAM caches is simultaneous accesses to all tags for parallel comparison operation in a cache set, which has not been addressed in previous work. This paper first demonstrates that high read accesses to tag array extremely increase the read disturbance rate and then proposes a low-cost scheme, so-called Read Disturbance Rate Reduction in STT-MRAM Caches by Selective Tag Comparison (3RSeT), to reduce the error rate by eliminating a significant portion of tag reads. 3RSeT proactively disables the tags that have no chance for hit, using low significant bits of the tags on each access request. Our evaluations using gem5 full-system cycle-accurate simulator show that 3RSeT reduces the read disturbance rate in the tag array by 71.8%, which results in 3.6x improvement in Mean Time To Failure (MTTF). In addition, the energy consumption is reduced by 62.1% without compromising performance and with less than 0.4% area overhead.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_22551
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle 3RSeT: Read Disturbance Rate Reduction in STT-MRAM Caches by Selective Tag Comparison
Cheshmikhani, Elham
Farbeh, Hamed
Asad, Hossein
Hardware Architecture
Emerging Technologies
Performance
Recent development in memory technologies has introduced Spin-Transfer Torque Magnetic RAM (STT-MRAM) as the most promising replacement for SRAMs in on-chip cache memories. Besides its lower leakage power, higher density, immunity to radiation-induced particles, and non-volatility, an unintentional bit flip during read operation, referred to as read disturbance error, is a severe reliability challenge in STT-MRAM caches. One major source of read disturbance error in STT-MRAM caches is simultaneous accesses to all tags for parallel comparison operation in a cache set, which has not been addressed in previous work. This paper first demonstrates that high read accesses to tag array extremely increase the read disturbance rate and then proposes a low-cost scheme, so-called Read Disturbance Rate Reduction in STT-MRAM Caches by Selective Tag Comparison (3RSeT), to reduce the error rate by eliminating a significant portion of tag reads. 3RSeT proactively disables the tags that have no chance for hit, using low significant bits of the tags on each access request. Our evaluations using gem5 full-system cycle-accurate simulator show that 3RSeT reduces the read disturbance rate in the tag array by 71.8%, which results in 3.6x improvement in Mean Time To Failure (MTTF). In addition, the energy consumption is reduced by 62.1% without compromising performance and with less than 0.4% area overhead.
title 3RSeT: Read Disturbance Rate Reduction in STT-MRAM Caches by Selective Tag Comparison
topic Hardware Architecture
Emerging Technologies
Performance
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22551