@inproceedings{451ddc0655154df9827d9ecca6e83c1e,
title = "Design of a power-efficient ARM processor with a timing-error detection and correction mechanism",
abstract = "With the growing popularity of mobile devices, the trend in the field of system-on-chip has shifted from high performance to low power operation. However, traditional design methodology is limited by the design margins reserved for process, voltage and temperature variations. Therefore, a systematic solution that enables real-time timing error detection and correction was proposed to eliminate redundant margins in the design of an ARM microprocessor. A prototype stochastic ARM1136 processor was implemented in TSMC 90nm technology. Two circuit-level techniques, Razor and Surger, are exploited to form a hybrid error detection mechanism by observing both global and local timing information. To enable the deployment of aggressive voltage scaling with hardware-based error tolerance mechanism, we propose an activity-driven optimization flow to reshape the slack distribution based on path-activation probability. The chip achieves a frequency of 250MHz at worst case with 48.82mW power consumption. The overall power overhead of the proposed error tolerance mechanism is about 25% (hold-fixing latches 15.25% plus Razor 10.53%). The energy saving through design margins elimination is 51% (an average of the three corner cases) and a 42.8% saving was measured at the lowest operation voltage.",
keywords = "Error Correction, Error Detection, Error Resilience, Razor, Stochastic Processor, Surger",
author = "Chen, {Sao Jie} and Grace Liu and Yang, {Hsin Ping} and Luo, {Cheng Hao} and Hwu, {Wen Mei}",
year = "2016",
month = jul,
day = "2",
doi = "10.1109/SOCC.2016.7905471",
language = "English (US)",
series = "International System on Chip Conference",
publisher = "IEEE Computer Society",
pages = "217--222",
editor = "Karan Bhatia and Massimo Alioto and Danella Zhao and Andrew Marshall and Ramalingam Sridhar",
booktitle = "Proceedings - 29th IEEE International System on Chip Conference, SOCC 2016",
note = "29th IEEE International System on Chip Conference, SOCC 2016 ; Conference date: 06-09-2016 Through 09-09-2016",
}