Title
A Light-Weight Timing Resilient Scheme for Near-Threshold Efficient Digital ICs
Abstract
Near-threshold voltage (NTV) operation has potential to substantially improve the energy efficiency of digital integrated circuits (ICs). However, it also introduces excessive conservative timing margins. The timing resilient circuit was proved to be a promising solution to mitigate excessive timing margins. To realize more energy-efficient IC systems, the timing resilient circuits should be designed to be miniaturized and operate in wide-voltage-range (down to NTV).This paper develops a lightweight timing resilient scheme to enable the near-threshold efficient ICs. The proposed scheme based on our node transition signal detector (NTSD) design with merely 9 extra transistors. Combined with the data strobe Flip-Flops, the circuits are inserted into monitored points of the target ICs. To further reduce the overhead, we develop the mean-time-to-failure aware hybrid selection algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme enable the 40-nm CNN accelerator to work robustly at 0.38-1.1V with only 3.5% extra area overhead. Moreover, this scheme reduce area overhead by 54.68% and improve energy efficiency by 53.69% at 0.6V, compared with the presented Razor scheme. The advantage of our proposed method lies in that it consumes less extra overhead and can work stably in a wider voltage range.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1109/APCCAS50809.2020.9301717
2020 IEEE Asia Pacific Conference on Circuits and Systems (APCCAS)
Keywords
DocType
ISBN
energy-efficient IC systems,timing resilient circuit,wide-voltage-range,NTV,lightweight timing resilient scheme,node transition signal detector design,mean-time-to-failure aware hybrid selection algorithm,energy efficiency,Razor scheme,near-threshold efficient digital IC,near-threshold voltage operation,digital integrated circuits,excessive conservative timing margins,NTSD design,CNN accelerator,voltage 0.6 V,voltage 0.38 V to 1.1 V,size 40 nm
Conference
978-1-7281-9397-7
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
7
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Xuemei Fan100.68
Li Hongwei253561.38
Qiang Li32014.81
Rujin Wang400.34
Hao Liu521259.74
Shengli Lu621.38