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Reducing NBTI-induced processor wearout by exploiting the timing slack of instructions

Published: 07 October 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Transistor aging due to Negative Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI) is a major reliability challenge for embedded microprocessors at nanoscale. It leads to increasing path delays and eventually more failures during runtime. In this paper, we propose a novel microarchitectural approach combining aging-aware instruction scheduling with specialized functional units to alleviate the impact of NBTI-induced wearout. To achieve this, the instructions are classified depending on their worst-case delay into critical (i.e. the instructions whose delay is close to the cycle boundary) and non-critical instructions (i.e. those instruction with larger timing slack). Each of these classes uses its own (specialized) functional unit(s). By that means it is possible to increase the idle ratio of the units executing the critical instructions, which can be used to extend lifetime by up to 2.3x in average compared to the usually used balanced scheduling policy.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      CODES+ISSS '12: Proceedings of the eighth IEEE/ACM/IFIP international conference on Hardware/software codesign and system synthesis
      October 2012
      596 pages
      ISBN:9781450314268
      DOI:10.1145/2380445
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 07 October 2012

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      Author Tags

      1. functional unit
      2. instruction scheduling
      3. microarchitecture
      4. nbti
      5. transistor aging

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      • Research-article

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      ESWEEK'12
      ESWEEK'12: Eighth Embedded System Week
      October 7 - 12, 2012
      Tampere, Finland

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      CODES+ISSS '12 Paper Acceptance Rate 48 of 163 submissions, 29%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 280 of 864 submissions, 32%

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