Efficient reliability management in SoCs - an approximate DRAM perspective

In today's computing systems Dynamic Random Access Memories (DRAMs) have a large influence on performance and contribute significantly to the total power consumption. Thus, recent research activities bring the idea of approximate DRAM into focus to save power and improve performance by lowering the refresh rate or disabling refresh completely. Hence, fast and accurate models are required for a thoroughly exploration of approximate DRAM for error resilient applications. In this paper we present a holistic simulation environment for investigations on approximate DRAM and show the impact on error resilient applications.