Designing reliable, yet energy-efficient guardbands

Technology scaling has entered an inflection point in which optimizing on-chip systems for reliability is at least as important as optimizing them for performance. Even though the majority of reliability degradations had been known for a long time, they have been investigated separately. As the causes are of physical origin, the fact that degradation effects may magnify or cancel each other cannot be neglected. Therefore, we investigate the joint impact of multiple degradation effects demonstrating that what matters to answer the critical question of “what is a reliable, yet energy-efficient guardband?” is the interdependencies between them. Our investigation, based on our degradation-aware cell libraries, demonstrates that considering interdependencies leads to 76% smaller, and hence more efficient, guardbands.