Aging-Aware Boosting

DVFS-based boosting techniques have been widely employed by commercial multi-core processors, due to their superiority in improving the performance. Boosting, however, is particularly stressing circuits and hence it significantly contributes to an accelerated aging process. Circuit aging has become a real reliability concern because it leads to an increase in transistor threshold voltage that may cause timing errors as a result of higher delays in critical paths. Thus, high performance is desirable but it shortens the circuit lifetime through aging leaving a choice to trade-off. Besides well-known long-term aging effects, recent research also reported short-term aging effects. Our claim is that DVFS-based boosting techniques should consider both long- and short-term aging effects. This can be circumvented by wider timing guardbands. But that would be more expensive. The goal of this work is therefore to analyze and optimize boosting under specific consideration of long-term and short-term aging effects. As a result of our findings, we propose the first comprehensive aging-aware, yet efficient boosting technique. The employed aging-aware cell libraries in this work are publicly available at http://ces.itec.kit.edu/dependable-hardware.php.