Helmet: A resistance drift resilient architecture for multi-level cell phase change memory system

Phase change memory (PCM) is emerging as a promising solution for future memory systems and disk caches. As a type of resistive memory, PCM relies on the electrical resistance of Ge₂Sb₂Te₅ (GST) to represent stored information. With the adoption of multi-level programming PCM devices, unwanted resistance drift is becoming an increasing reliability concern in future high-density, multi-level cell PCM systems. To address this issue without incurring a significant storage and performance overhead in ECC, conventional design employs a conservative approach, which increases the resistance margin between two adjacent states to combat resistance drift. In this paper, we show that the wider margin adversely impacts the low-power benefit of PCM by incurring up to 2.3X power overhead and causes up to 100X lifetime reduction, thereby exacerbating the wear-out issue. To tolerate resistance drift, we proposed Helmet, a multi-level cell phase change memory architecture that can cost-effectively reduce the readout error rate due to drift. Therefore, we can relax the requirement on margin size, while preserving the readout reliability of the conservative approach, and consequently minimize the power and endurance overhead due to drift. Simulation results show that our techniques are able to decrease the error rate by an average of 87%. Alternatively, for satisfying the same reliability target, our schemes can achieve 28% power savings and a 15X endurance enhancement due to the reduced margin size when compared to the conservative approach.