Overhead Reduction with Optimal Margining Using A Reliability Aware Design Paradigm

Design margins are necessary to ensure reliable operation of integrated circuits over extreme ranges of environmental variations (Voltage, Temperature) and manufacturing Process variations. On top of these PVT variations, aging related parametric drift (e.g. due to BTI, HCI) also limits performance by requiring additional timing margin. In principle, corner based design methodology can be adopted. However, this approach is sub-optimal, because it applies margins which may be either too optimistic or pessimistic since it tends to ignore the correlation effects which exist inherently due to the circuit topology and the workload effects. In this paper, we propose a workload-dependent reliability aware optimization flow under the influence of NBTI aging by utilizing an optimal margining scheme. The proposed flow takes into account the relevant correlations in a design by modelling the degradation accurately and thus enables achieving the desired Power-Performance-Area (PPA) goals without severe reliability penalty.