Exploiting the Presence of Abundant Zero Data to Improve NVM Lifespan

The emerging Non-volatile Memories are expected to play a big role in building large scale and energy-efficient memory systems in the future, owing to their excellent scalability and low leakage power consumption. Downsides like Low endurance, high write-energy and slow writes, however thwart their adoption as future memory options. In this paper, we propose a compression technique called ZeCom that mitigates the low endurance issue of non-volatile memories by effectively compressing the incoming blocks to NVM-based main memory by removing the zero words present within the block. While ZeCom lowers bit-flips in memory by reducing the amount of data written in memory, we apply Flip-N-Write (FNW) encoding technique on the compressed block in an adaptive manner (termed adFNW) to further reduce bit-flips and improve endurance of memory at minimal storage overhead. The combined approach ZeCom+adFNW reduces bit-flips considerably and leads to significant improvement in memory lifetime.