Fault Models for Phase Change Memory

Abstract

Phase Change Memory (PCM) is the newest type of non-volatile memory that shall replace the currently wide spread flash memory. Recent research activities performed on PCM reliability and operation have identified special failure modes that are particular to this type of memory. In this paper, these failures are identified and their behavior is analyzed in order to develop appropriate fault models that describe their behavior using traditional memory fault notation. In addition, an efficient test algorithm, called March-PCM, is proposed to test all modeled faults.