Dependability analysis of memory subsystems /
This research presents the simulation-assisted radiation-testing environment wherein the dependability analysis of memory subsystems using simulation and radiation experiment can be conducted. A recent system-design trend requires a high memory bandwidth to support the high-performance processor and...
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| Format: | Thesis Book |
| Language: | English |
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[Place of publication not identified] :
[publisher not identified] ;
1999.
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://proxy.library.tamu.edu/login?url=http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=733675681&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=2945&RQT=309&VName=PQD |
| Summary: | This research presents the simulation-assisted radiation-testing environment wherein the dependability analysis of memory subsystems using simulation and radiation experiment can be conducted. A recent system-design trend requires a high memory bandwidth to support the high-performance processor and the diverse media applications. The increasing demand for larger and faster memory subsystems is driving the memory integration density and access-mode efficiency to a new height. Even in the technology targeting the billion-transistor silicon, more than 50% of silicon is used for memory such as on-chip cache and register ales. The enhanced integration, however, adversely affects the resilience of the system to single and multi-bit soft errors that caused by the single event upset (SEU) effects in the memory circuits. A number of simulation studies and radiation experiments are performed in the proposed testing environment to investigate the reliability issues of primary cache and main memories. For the reliability analysis of primary cache memory, a number of design configurations are studied. To silence the soft errors that occur in the cache memory, a selective set invalidation (SSI) cache design is proposed and its design overhead is estimated. For the reliability analysis of main memory, first, the critical charge amounts of the susceptible sub-circuits of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) are determined. Then the radiation beams are selected according to the determined charge amount. The memory fault-injection simulation using the results from the radiation experiments is performed at the system/software level. The reliability trend of recent DRAM components is studied within our testing environment. Various DRAM generations including 4 Mb (1Mx4) fast page mode (FPM) DRAM, 16 Mb (4Mx4) extended data out (EDO) DRAM, and 64 Mb synchronous DRAM (SDRAM) are subjected in our experiments. The extensive quantitative results and discussions pointing out the key-reliability trends of memories are included in this research. |
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| Item Description: | Vita. "Major Subject: Computer Engineering". |
| Physical Description: | xii, 101 leaves : illustrations ; 28 cm. Issued also on microfiche from University Microfilm Inc. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (leaves 94-100). |