Hprobe: a test equipment manufacturer based in Grenoble France, has cast its vote for MRAM to succeed in the emerging memory battle. It has created a piece of production test equipment dedicated to MRAM technology.
The company has developed a new perpendicular magnetic generator module that allows Continue reading “Hprobe’s Vote for MRAM”
The Memory Guy, as a regular reader of The SSD Guy’s posts, found an interesting one that compares the endurance of Optane SSDs against that of NAND flash SSDs. Perhaps this could provide some insight into the Intel & Micron claim that 3D XPoint Memory’s endurance is 1,000 times that of standard NAND flash, shown in the graphic to the left.
The SSD Guy post converts several different measures of SSD endurance against each other: TBW, DWPD, and GB/Day. Definitions of these terms can be found in that post.
It occurred to me that any of these can be used to roughly gauge the relative endurance of 3D XPoint Memory against that of NAND flash.
Take DWPD for example: Drive Writes per Day. Not only is this a measure of how many times that an SSD can be over-written every day, but it’s also an indication of the number of times that each memory cell can be overwritten. If you know this, and if you know how long Continue reading “Examining 3D XPoint’s 1,000 Times Endurance Benefit”
Since I am the Memory Guy I hate learning that I missed something new and cool in the world of memories, but somehow I was unaware of last week’s Memsys conference in Washington DC until a participant notified me on Saturday that his paper: “Reverse Engineering of DRAMs: Row Hammer with Crosshair,” had been given the the best paper award.
Upon looking at the Memsys website it looks like a very intriguing academic conference. about sixty papers were presented in eight interesting sessions:
in addition to a few apparently-fascinating keynotes.
Fortunately, all of the papers are Continue reading “Memsys: A New Memory Conference”
One of those nasty little secrets about DRAM is that bits may get corrupted by simply reading the bits in a different part of the chip. This has been given the name “Row Hammer” (or Rowhammer) because repeated accesses to a single one of the DRAM’s internal “rows” of bits can bleed charge off of the adjacent rows, causing bits to flip. These repeated accesses are referred to as “hammering”.
Although this was once thought to be an issue only with DDR3 DRAMs, recent papers (listed on the DDR Detective) show that DDR4 also suffers from Row Hammer issues, even though DRAM makers took pains to prevent it.
One big champion of this phenomenon is Barbara Aichinger (pictured) of FuturePlus Systems, a test equipment maker that specializes in detecting row hammer issues. The Memory Guy has had the pleasure of talking with her about this issue and learning first-hand the kind of difficulties it creates.
How does Row Hammer work? It stems from the fact Continue reading “What is DRAM “Row Hammer”?”
