Self-Adaptive mechanism for cache memory reliability improvement

This paper proposes a graceful degradation method applied to k-way set associative cache memories. The method is called “Self Adaptive cache Memories” (SAM); it works by removing the faulty locations from use, while reorganizing the memory to maintain a high performance. For the proposed contribution, the analysis provided herein reveals a significant reliability increase for the cache memory, while the entailed overhead remains small in comparison with the attained goals.