DeJaVu: Why You Should Write to Your DRAM Rows Twice, Carefully

Summary

We provide the first experimental demonstration of DejaVu, a phenomenon where the data previously written to DRAM cells affects DRAM’s vulnerability to read disturbance. Our experimental characterization using 112 commercial-off-the-shelf DDR4 DRAM chips from all three major manufacturers shows that, compared to the baseline where we initialize the victim row by writing to it only once, 1) initializing the victim row by overwriting the victim row with the opposite data (compared to what was previously written) reduces ACmin (the minimum aggressor row activation count to induce at least one bitflip; a lower ACmin means higher vulnerability to read disturbance), and 2) initializing the victim row by writing the same data twice increases ACmin. We provide two hypotheses to explain DejaVu. First, we hypothesize that overwriting the victim row with the opposite data values causes the under-restoration of charge in the DRAM cells. Second, we hypothesize that the process of overwriting the victim row changes the charge trap states in the active region, affecting the read-disturbance-induced cell leakage current. We conduct controlled experimental characterization to provide insight into these two hypotheses. To further investigate DejaVu’s potential impact on the cur- rent passing capability of the DRAM cell access transistors, we characterize the reliability of Processing-Using-DRAM (PUD) operations with DRAM rows initialized with DejaVu patterns. Our experimental characterization of 32-row MAJ-3 operation shows that by overwriting the DRAM rows used in the operation, the number of bitlines that fail to reliably perform MAJ-3 reduces by 32.7% on average compared to the baseline where the rows are written only once. We hypothesize that DejaVu’s effects make the distribution of the current passing capabilities of the access transistors of DRAM cells more uniform compared to the baseline. Based on our observations, we describe two major implications of DejaVu. We provide an example of how DRAM testing and characterization methodologies should take DejaVu into consideration to 1) accurately characterize the read disturbance vulnerability of DRAM rows under fixed data patterns, and 2) rigorously study the effect of different data patterns on read disturbance by avoiding unintended interference from DejaVu. We also evaluate the additional performance overhead of read disturbance mitigation techniques when their read disturbance thresholds need to be lowered to be secure against DejaVu and show that they induce higher performance overheads (e.g., 6.3% performance overhead when reducing the read disturbance threshold by 20% as a guardband to mitigate DejaVu).