21st International Conference on VLSI Design (VLSI Design 2008)
Energy-Efficient Soft-Error Protection Using Operand Encoding and Operation Bypass
Hyderabad, India
January 04-January 08
ISBN: 0-7695-3083-4
As designs scale further into the nanometer regime, the vulnerability of logic circuits in commodity products to soft errors is increasing and their contribution towards total chip soft-error rate (SER) is predicted to be as high as 60%, much more than that of memory. We employ a value-aware framework that enables operation bypass in combinational circuits to simultaneously reduce both energy consumption and SER in them. Unlike techniques that reduce SER in combinational logic with very high performance and/or en- ergy overheads (since they usually employ significant ex- plicit spatial or temporal redundancy), our technique dy- namically exploits operand values by shutting off portions of combinational circuits, thus reducing vulnerable area and energy consumption with minimal performance over- heads. On the average across the SPEC CPU2k benchmark suite, we obtain 60% SER reduction and 24% energy sav- ings with minimal impact on performance. Keywords: low-power design, operand encoding, opera- tion bypass, soft error.
Citation:
Kaushal R. Gandhi, Nihar R. Mahapatr, "Energy-Efficient Soft-Error Protection Using Operand Encoding and Operation Bypass," vlsid, pp.45-51, 21st International Conference on VLSI Design (VLSI Design 2008), 2008