Impact of dynamic voltage scaling and thermal factors on FinFET-based SRAM reliability

Abstract

Abstract-FinFET technology appears as an alternative solution to mitigate short-channel effects in traditional CMOS down-scaled technology. Emerging embedded systems are likely to employ FinFET and dynamic voltage scaling (DVS), aiming to improve system performance and energy-efficiency. This paper claims that the use of DVS increases the susceptibility of FinFETbased SRAM cells to soft errors under radiation effects. To investigate that, a methodology that allows determining the critical charge according to the dynamic behaviour of the temperature as a function of the voltage scaling is used. Obtained results support our claim by showing that both temperature and voltage scaling can increase up to five times the susceptibility of FinFET-based SRAM cells to the occurrence of soft errors.

Software and hardware interfaces for approximate memories

“…The parameters are adjusted to unreliable ranges working as approximation knobs that control the error. Examples of such parameters are supply voltage [19,100], frequency [123], and memory refresh rate [18,71,90]. The manifestation of errors depends on the approximate component, but these techniques usually are nondeterministic and the error probability has a defined relation with the approximation knob.…”