A Replacement Strategy for Canary Flip-Flops

The deep sub micron semiconductor technologies increase parameter variations. The increase in parameter variations requires excessive design margin that has serious impact on performance and power consumption. In order to eliminate the excessive design margin, we are investigating canary Flip-Flop (FF). Canary FF requires additional circuits consisting of an FF and a comparator. Thus, it suffers large area overhead. In order to reduce the area overhead, this paper proposes a selective replacement method for canary FF and evaluates it. In the case of Renesas's M32R processor, the area overhead of 2% is achieved.