Increasing dynamic variability with technology scaling has made it essential to incorporate large design-time timing margins to ensure yield and reliable operation. Online techniques for timing error resilience help recover timing margins, improving performance and/or power consumption. This paper presents TIMBER, a technique for online timing error resilience that masks timing errors by borrowing time from successive pipeline stages. TIMBER-based error masking can recover timing margins without instruction replay or roll-back support. Two sequential circuit elements -TIM-BER flip-flop and TIMBER latch -that implement error masking based on time-borrowing are described. Both circuit elements are validated using corner-case circuit simulations, and the overhead and trade-offs of TIMBER-based error masking are evaluated on an industrial processor.
Read and write assist techniques are now commonly used to lower the minimum operating voltage (Vmin) of an SRAM. In this paper, we review the efficacy of four leading write-assist (WA) techniques and their behavior at lower supply voltages in commercial SRAMs from 65nm, 45nm and 32nm low power technology nodes. In particular, the word-line boosting and negative bit-line WA techniques seem most promising at lower voltages. These two techniques help reduce the value of W Lcrit by a factor of ∼2.5X at 0.7V and also decrease the 3σ spread by ∼3.3X, thus significantly reducing the impact of process variations. These write-assist techniques also impact the dynamic read noise margin (DRNM) of half-selected cells during the write operation. The negative bit-line WA technique has virtually no impact on the DRNM but all other WA techniques degrade the DRNM by 10-15%. In conjunction with the benefit (decrease in W Lcrit) and the negative impact (decrease in DRNM), overhead of implementation in terms of area and performance must be analyzed to choose the best write-assist technique for lowering the SRAM Vmin.
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