TIMBER: Time borrowing and error relaying for online timing error resilience

Increasing dynamic variability with technology scaling has made it essential to incorporate large design-time timing margins to ensure yield and reliable operation. Online techniques for timing error resilience help recover timing margins, improving performance and/or power consumption. This paper presents TIMBER, a technique for online timing error resilience that masks timing errors by borrowing time from successive pipeline stages. TIMBER-based error masking can recover timing margins without instruction replay or roll-back support. Two sequential circuit elements — TIMBER flip-flop and TIMBER latch — that implement error masking based on time-borrowing are described. Both circuit elements are validated using corner-case circuit simulations, and the overhead and trade-offs of TIMBER-based error masking are evaluated on an industrial processor.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: DATE
• Authors: Mihir R. Choudhury, Vikas Chandra, Kartik Mohanram, Robert C. Aitken
• Keywords: DATE 2010, Design-time Timing Margins, Hardware, Timing Error Resilience, Timing Margins