Fault Tolerant Approximate Computing Using Emerging Non-Volatile Spintronic Memories

The approximate computing paradigm can be leveraged to exploit the intrinsic error resilience of many applications to enable highly efficient memory implementations. Most emerging memory technologies have a wide range of performance/power/reliability trade-offs which can be exploited in fault tolerant approximate computing. In this work, we use approximate computing to tolerate the increased retention failure rate caused by relaxing the thermal stability factor of Spin-Transfer Torque Magnetic RAM (STT-MRAM) to enable fast and energy efficient STT-MRAM cache memories for image applications.