DC-PCM: Mitigating PCM Write Disturbance with Low Performance Overhead by Using Detection Cells

As DRAM scaling becomes ever more difficult, Phase Change Memory (PCM) is attracting attention as a new memory or storage class memory. Unfortunately, PCM cell data can be changed by frequently writing 0 to adjacent cells. This phenomenon is called Write Disturbance (WD). To mitigate WD errors with low performance overhead, we propose a Detection Cell PCM (DC-PCM). In the DC-PCM, additional cells called Detection Cells (DC) are allocated to a memory-line to pre-detect WD errors. For pre-detection, we propose schemes that give DCs higher WD-vulnerability than normal cells. However, additional time is needed to verify DCs. To hide the time needed to perform the verifications during a WRITE, DC-PCM enables the local word-lines of DCs to operate independently (Decoupled Word-line), and verifies different directions in parallel (Parallel DC-Verification). After verification, the DC-PCM increases the WD-vulnerability of the DCs, or restores the memory-line data (DC-Correction). In our simulation, DC-PCMs showed performance comparable to a WD-free PCM for all workloads.