CryoGuard: A Near Refresh-Free Robust DRAM Design for Cryogenic Computing

Cryogenic computing, which runs a computer device at an extremely low temperature, is highly promising thanks to the significant reduction of the wire latency and leakage current. A recently proposed cryogenic DRAM design achieved the promising performance improvement, but it also reveals that it must reduce the DRAM’s dynamic power to overcome the huge cooling cost at 77 K. Therefore, researchers now target to reduce the cryogenic DRAM’s refresh power by utilizing its significantly increased retention time driven by the reduced leakage current. To achieve the goal, however, architects should first answer many fundamental questions regarding the reliability and then design a refresh-free, but still robust cryogenic DRAM by utilizing the analysis result.In this work, we propose a near refresh-free, but robust cryogenic DRAM (NRFC-DRAM), which can almost eliminate its refresh overhead while ensuring reliable operations at 77 K. For the purpose, we first evaluate various DRAM samples of multiple vendors by conducting a thorough analysis to accurately estimate the cryogenic DRAM’s retention time and reliability. Our analysis identifies a new critical challenge such that reducing DRAM’s refresh rate can make the memory highly unreliable because normal memory operations can now appear as row-hammer attacks at 77 K. Therefore, NRFC-DRAM requires a cost-effective, cryogenic-friendly protection mechanism against the new row-hammer-like "faults" at 77 K.To resolve the challenge, we present CryoGuard, our cryogenic-friendly row-hammer protection method to ensure the NRFC-DRAM’s reliable operations at 77 K. With CryoGuard applied, NRFC-DRAM reduces the overall power consumption by 25.9 % even with its cooling cost included, whereas the existing cryogenic DRAM fails to reduce the power consumption.