Area efficient architectures for information integrity in cache memories

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1999
Authors
Kim, Seongwoo
Somani, Arun
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Somani, Arun
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Electrical and Computer Engineering

The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECpE) contains two focuses. The focus on Electrical Engineering teaches students in the fields of control systems, electromagnetics and non-destructive evaluation, microelectronics, electric power & energy systems, and the like. The Computer Engineering focus teaches in the fields of software systems, embedded systems, networking, information security, computer architecture, etc.

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The Department of Electrical Engineering was formed in 1909 from the division of the Department of Physics and Electrical Engineering. In 1985 its name changed to Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering. In 1995 it became the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

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1909-present

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  • Department of Electrical Engineering (1909-1985)
  • Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering (1985-1995)

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Electrical and Computer Engineering
Abstract

Information integrity in cache memories is a fundamental requirement for dependable computing. Conventional architectures for enhancing cache reliability using check codes make it difficult to trade between the level of data integrity and the chip area requirement. We focus on transient fault tolerance in primary cache memories and develop new architectural solutions to maximize fault coverage when the budgeted silicon area is not sufficient for the conventional configuration of an error checking code. The underlying idea is to exploit the corollary of reference locality in the organization and management of the code. A higher protection priority is dynamically assigned to the portions of the cache that are more error-prone and have a higher probability of access. The error-prone likelihood prediction is based on the access frequency. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed schemes using a trace-driven simulation combined with software error injection using four different fault manifestation models. From the simulation results, we show that for most benchmarks the proposed architectures are effective and area efficient for increasing the cache integrity under all four models.

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This is a manuscript of a proceeding published as Kim, Seongwoo, and Arun K. Somani. "Area efficient architectures for information integrity in cache memories." In Proceedings of the 26th International Symposium on Computer Architecture, pp. 246-255. IEEE, 1999. DOI: 10.1109/ISCA.1999.765955. Posted with permission.

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Fri Jan 01 00:00:00 UTC 1999