In Situ Error Detection Techniques in Ultralow Voltage Pipelines: Analysis and Optimizations

In order to achieve high tolerance against process, voltage, and temperature variations in the ultralow voltage (ULV) circuits, in situ error detection and correction (EDAC) techniques were presented. However, circuits adding the capability of error detection incur large hardware overhead, especially in ULV due to larger delay variability. In this paper, we analyze the hardware overhead of error detection techniques in pipelines based on three different sequential elements: flip-flops, two-phase latches, and pulsed latches. By exploiting the cycle-borrowing ability, we propose a technique called sparse insertion of error detecting registers on the two-phase latch-based and pulsed-latch-based pipelines to reduce the sequential logic area. Furthermore, we propose a delay-padding methodology using a multi-V
_t
cell library in ULV circuits to reduce EDAC hardware overhead. The proposed techniques are applied on a benchmark six-stage pipeline operating at 0.35 V in a 65-nm CMOS. The analysis results show that our proposed techniques can reduce the total area by 26%-33% and the error detecting register count by 2.9-4.3× compared with conventional EDAC techniques.