Defect and Transient Fault-Tolerant System Design for Hybrid CMOS/Nanodevice Digital Memories

Targeting on the future fault-prone hybrid CMOS/nanodevice digital memories, this paper presents two fault-tolerance design approaches that integrally address the tolerance for defects and transient faults. These two approaches share several key features, including the use of a group of Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH) codes for both defect tolerance and transient fault tolerance, and integration of BCH code selection and dynamic logical-to-physical address mapping. The first approach is straightforward and easy to implement but suffers from a rapid drop of achievable storage capacity as defect densities and/or transient fault rates increase, while the second approach can achieve much higher storage capacity under high defect densities and/or transient fault rates at the cost of higher implementation complexity and longer memory access latency. Based on extensive computer simulations and BCH decoder circuit design, we have demonstrated the effectiveness of the presented approaches under a wide range of defect densities and transient fault rates, while taking into account of the fault-tolerance storage overhead and BCH decoder implementation cost in CMOS domain