Impact and Mitigation of Sense Amplifier Aging Degradation Using Realistic Workloads

Designers typically add design margins to compensate for time-zero variability (due to process variation) and time-dependent (due to, e.g., bias temperature instability) variability. These variabilities become worse with scaling, which leads to larger design margin requirements. As an alternative, m...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on very large scale integration (VLSI) systems 2017-12, Vol.25 (12), p.3464-3472
Main Authors: Kraak, Daniel, Taouil, Mottaqiallah, Agbo, Innocent, Hamdioui, Said, Weckx, Pieter, Cosemans, Stefan, Catthoor, Francky
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Aging
Benchmark testing
Benchmarks
Degradation
Delays
Design
Design margins
Electric potential
memory
Microprocessors
mitigation
offset voltage
Random access memory
sense amplifier (SA)
Sense amplifiers
Stability
static random-access memory
Temperature measurement
Temperature sensors
time-dependent variability
time-zero variability
Workload
Workloads
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Summary:Designers typically add design margins to compensate for time-zero variability (due to process variation) and time-dependent (due to, e.g., bias temperature instability) variability. These variabilities become worse with scaling, which leads to larger design margin requirements. As an alternative, mitigation schemes can be applied to counteract the variability. This paper investigates the impact of aging on the offset voltage of the memory's sense amplifier (SA). For the analysis, the degradation of the SAs in the L1 data and instruction caches of an ARM processor is quantified while using realistic workloads extracted from the SPEC CPU2006 Benchmark suite. Furthermore, the effect of our mitigation scheme, i.e., an online control circuit that balances the SA workload, is analyzed. The simulation results show that the mitigation scheme reduces the offset voltage degradation due to aging with up to 40% for the benchmarks, depending on the stress conditions (temperature, voltage, and workload).
ISSN:1063-8210
1557-9999
DOI:10.1109/TVLSI.2017.2746798