Razor: A Low-Power Pipeline Based on Circuit-Level Timing Speculation

With increasing clock frequencies and silicon integration, power aware computing has become a critical concern in the design of embedded processors and systems-on-chip. One of the more effective and widely used methods for power-aware computing is dynamic voltage scaling (DVS). In order to obtain the maximum power savings from DVS, it is essential to scale the supply voltage as low as possible while ensuring correct operation of the processor. The critical voltage is chosen such that under a worst-case scenario of process and environmental variations, the processor always operates correctly. However, this approach leads to a very conservative supply voltage since such a worst-case combination of different variabilities will be very rare. In this paper, we propose a new approach to DVS, called Razor, based on dynamic detection and correction of circuit timing errors. The key idea of Razor is to tune the supply voltage by monitoring the error rate during circuit operation, thereby elimi...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: MICRO
• Authors: Dan Ernst, Nam Sung Kim, Shidhartha Das, Sanjay Pant, Rajeev R. Rao, Toan Pham, Conrad H. Ziesler, David Blaauw, Todd M. Austin, Krisztián Flautner, Trevor N. Mudge
• Keywords: Hardware, MICRO 2003, Razor, Supply Voltage, Voltage