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Emerging Memories (EMs) could benefit from Error Correcting Codes (ECCs) able to correct few errors in a few nanoseconds. The low latency is necessary to meet the DRAM- like and/or eXecuted-in-Place requirements of Storage Class Memory devices. The error correction capability would help manufacturers to cope with unknown failure mechanisms and to fulfill the market demand for a rapid increase in density. This paper shows the design of an ECC decoder for a shortened BCH code with 256-data-bit page able to correct three errors in less than 3 ns. The tight latency constraint is met by pre-computing the coefficients of carefully chosen Error Locator Polynomials, by optimizing the operations in the Galois Fields and by resorting to a fully parallel combinatorial implementation of the decoder. The latency and the area occupancy are first estimated by the number of elementary gates to traverse, and by the total number of elementary gates of the decoder. Eventually, the implementation of the solution by Synopsys topographical synthesis methodology in 54nm logic gate length CMOS technology gives a latency lower than 3 ns and a total area less than \(250 \cdot 10^3 \mu m^2\).
Multiple-channel die-stacked DRAMs have been used for maximizing the performance and minimizing the power of memory access in 2.5D/3D system chips. Stacked DRAM dies can be used as a cache for the processor die in 2.5D/3D system chips. Typically, modern processor system-on-chips (SOCs) have three-level caches, L1, L2, and L3. Could the DRAM cache be used to replace which level of caches? In this paper, we derive an inequality which can aid the designer to check if the designed DRAM cache can provide better performance than the L3 cache. Also, design considerations of DRAM caches for meet the inequality are discussed. We find that a dilemma of the DRAM cache access time and associativity exists for providing better performance than the L3 cache. Organizing multiple channels into a DRAM cache is proposed to cope with the dilemma.