Optimizing the Write Fidelity of MRAMs

Magnetic random-access memory (MRAM) is a promising memory technology due to its high density, non-volatility, and high endurance. However, achieving high memory fidelity incurs significant write-energy costs, which should be reduced for the large-scale deployment of MRAMs. In this paper, we formulate an optimization problem to maximize the memory fidelity given energy constraints, and propose a biconvex optimization approach to solve it. The basic idea is to allocate non-uniform write pulses depending on the importance of each bit position. We consider the mean squared error (MSE) as a fidelity metric and propose an iterative water-filling algorithm to minimize the MSE. Although the iterative algorithm does not guarantee the global optimality, we can choose a proper starting point that decreases the MSE exponentially and guarantees fast convergence. For an 8-bit accessed word, the proposed algorithm reduces the MSE by a factor of 21.