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Penelope: The NBTI-Aware Processor
Chicago, Illinois, USA December 01-December 05
DOI Bookmark: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MICRO.2007.1140th Annual IEEE/ACM International Sy ...
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Transistors consist of lower number of atoms with every technology generation. Such atoms may be displaced due to the stress caused by high temperature, frequency and current, leading to failures. NBTI (negative bias temperature instability) is one of the most important sources of failure affecting transistors. NBTI degrades PMOS transistors whenever the voltage at the gate is negative (logic input "0"). The main consequence is a reduction in the maximum operating frequency and an increase in the minimum supply voltage of storage structures to cope for the degradation. Many PMOS transistors affected by NBTI can be found in both combinational and storage blocks since they observe a "0" at their gates most of the time. This paper proposes and evaluates the design of Penelope, an NBTI-aware processor. We propose (i) generic strategies to mitigate degradation in both combinational and storage blocks, (ii) specific techniques to protect individual blocks by applying the global strategies, and (iii) a metric to assess the benefits of reduced degradation and the overheads in performance and power.
Citation:
Jaume Abella, Xavier Vera, Antonio Gonz?lez, "Penelope: The NBTI-Aware Processor," micro, pp.85-96, 40th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO 2007), 2007
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