Cross-layer resilience using wearout aware design flow

—As process technology shrinks devices, circuits experience accelerated wearout. Monitoring wearout will be critical for improving the efficiency of error detection and correction. The most effective wearout monitoring approach relies on continuously checking only the most critical circuit paths to detect timing degradation. However, circuits optimized for power and area efficiency have a steep critical path wall in some designs. Furthermore, wearout depends on dynamic conditions, such as processor’s operating environment, and application-specific path utilization profile. The dynamic nature of wearout coupled with steep critical path walls may result in excessive number of paths that need to be monitored. In this paper we propose a novel cross-layer circuit design flow that uses path timing information and runtime path utilization data to significantly enhance monitoring efficiency. The proposed methodology uses application-specific path utilization profile to select only a few pa...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: DSN
• Authors: Bardia Zandian, Murali Annavaram
• Keywords: Budget Constraints, Computer Networks, DSN 2011, Path Timing, Utilization Profile