High-throughput ECC with integrated chipkill protection for nonvolatile memory arrays

Abstract

New coding schemes based on generalized concatenated codes are proposed for emerging nonvolative memory technologies. Key requirements are high code rate, low latency, high throughput and the ability to correct chipkill failures while sustaining high data reliability despite raw bit error rates up to 10-3. New concatenated codes based on Reed-Solomon codes have been designed for payload sizes of 512B, 1kB, and 2kB; they have high rates above 0.8 and a high data reliability with a decoder target BER of 10-15. An FPGA-based implementation of the decoder validates the low latency and high throughput: for an operating clock frequency of 250MHz, the decoding latency is 236ns and a 9.3GB/s throughput is achieved.