Understanding Memory’s RowHammer Challenge (Download)
Rapid growth in the world’s digital information has driven continued improvements in computing to process, organize, and monetize insights gathered from this data. The semiconductor industry has enabled these advances with smaller process geometries that deliver more transistors per die, faster processing, and more memory to store the data being used. However, as processing gets faster and devices shrink, the hardware has become increasingly susceptible to errors.
Each new generation of DRAM offers many advantages, including higher performance, better power efficiency, and higher capacity, which has led to it becoming entrenched as the choice for main memory. Packing bit cells more closely together on a die enables the industry to develop higher capacities, but it’s also introduced and exacerbated a vulnerability and attack vector for malicious actors to exploit.