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Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) have become an important and promising hardware primitive for device fingerprinting, device identification, or key storage. Intrinsic PUFs leverage components already found in existing devices, unlike…

In this paper, we investigate the advanced circuit features such as wordline- (WL) underdrive (prevents retention failure) and overdrive (assists write) employed in the peripherals of Dynamic RAM (DRAM) memories from a security perspective.…

This article summarizes key results of our work on experimental characterization and analysis of latency variation and latency-reliability trade-offs in modern DRAM chips, which was published in SIGMETRICS 2016, and examines the work's…

We propose a new RowHammer mitigation mechanism, CoMeT, that prevents RowHammer bitflips with low area, performance, and energy costs in DRAM-based systems at very low RowHammer thresholds. The key idea of CoMeT is to use low-cost and…

Over the past two decades, the storage capacity and access bandwidth of main memory have improved tremendously, by 128x and 20x, respectively. These improvements are mainly due to the continuous technology scaling of DRAM (dynamic…

Resistive memories have limited lifetime caused by limited write endurance and highly non-uniform write access patterns. Two main techniques to mitigate endurance-related memory failures are 1) wear-leveling, to evenly distribute the writes…

This brief introduces a read bias circuit to improve readout yield of magnetic random access memories (MRAMs). A dynamic bias optimization (DBO) circuit is proposed to enable the real-time tracking of the optimal read voltage across…

Stability of ultra-low-voltage SRAM bitcells in retention mode is threatened by two types of uncertainty: process variability and intrinsic noise. While variability dominates the failure probability, noise-induced bit flips in weakened…

Non-volatile memory (NVM) is a class of promising scalable memory technologies that can potentially offer higher capacity than DRAM at the same cost point. Unfortunately, the access latency and energy of NVM is often higher than those of…

With deep learning deployed in many security-sensitive areas, machine learning security is becoming progressively important. Recent studies demonstrate attackers can exploit system-level techniques exploiting the RowHammer vulnerability of…

Low-power SRAM architectures are especially sensitive to many types of defects that may occur during manufacturing. Among these, resistive defects can appear. This paper analyzes some types of such defects that may impair the device…

Recent development in memory technologies has introduced Spin-Transfer Torque Magnetic RAM (STT-MRAM) as the most promising replacement for SRAMs in on-chip cache memories. Besides its lower leakage power, higher density, immunity to…

This article features extended summaries and retrospectives of some of the recent research done by our group, SAFARI, on (1) understanding, characterizing, and modeling various critical properties of modern DRAM and NAND flash memory, the…

A critical issue affecting filamentary resistive random access memory (RRAM) cells is the requirement of high voltages during electroforming. Reducing the magnitude of these voltages is of significant interest, as it ensures compatibility…

DRAM-based main memories have read operations that destroy the read data, and as a result, must buffer large amounts of data on each array access to keep chip costs low. Unfortunately, system-level trends such as increased memory contention…

Large Language Models (LLMs) deployed in practical and safety-critical settings are increasingly susceptible to bit-flip faults caused by hardware degradation, cosmic radiation, or deliberate fault-injection attacks such as Rowhammer. These…

Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) is the de-facto choice for main memory devices due to its cost-effectiveness. It offers a larger capacity and higher bandwidth compared to SRAM but is slower than the latter. With each passing generation,…

Spin-Transfer Torque Magnetic RAM (STT-MRAM) as one of the most promising replacements for SRAMs in on-chip cache memories benefits from higher density and scalability, near-zero leakage power, and non-volatility, but its reliability is…

This paper summarizes our work on experimental characterization and analysis of reduced-voltage operation in modern DRAM chips, which was published in SIGMETRICS 2017, and examines the work's significance and future potential. We take a…

We introduce ABACuS, a new low-cost hardware-counter-based RowHammer mitigation technique that performance-, energy-, and area-efficiently scales with worsening RowHammer vulnerability. We observe that both benign workloads and RowHammer…