Low Power Aging-Aware On-Chip Memory Structure Design by Duty Cycle Balancing

2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (09) ◽  
pp. 1650115
Author(s):  
Shuai Wang ◽  
Tao Jin ◽  
Chuanlei Zheng ◽  
Guangshan Duan

The degradation of CMOS devices over the lifetime can cause severe threat to the system performance and reliability at deep submicron semiconductor technologies. The negative bias temperature instability (NBTI) is among the most important sources of the aging mechanisms. Applying the traditional guardbanding technique to address the decreased speed of devices is too costly. On-chip memory structures, such as register files and on-chip caches, suffer a very high NBTI stress. In this paper, we propose the aging-aware design to combat the NBTI-induced aging in integer register files, data caches and instruction caches in high-performance microprocessors. The proposed aging-aware design can mitigate the negative aging effects by balancing the duty cycle ratio of the internal bits in on-chip memory structures. Besides the aging problem, the power consumption is also one of the most prominent issues in microprocessor design. Therefore, we further propose to apply the low power schemes to different memory structures under aging-aware design. The proposed low power aging-aware design can also achieve a significant power reduction, which will further reduce the temperature and NBTI degradation of the on-chip memory structures. Our experimental results show that our aging-aware design can effectively reduce the NBTI stress with 30.8%, 64.5% and 72.0% power saving for the integer register file, data cache and instruction cache, respectively.

Author(s):  
A. Ferrerón Labari ◽  
D. Suárez Gracia ◽  
V. Viñals Yúfera

In the last years, embedded systems have evolved so that they offer capabilities we could only find before in high performance systems. Portable devices already have multiprocessors on-chip (such as PowerPC 476FP or ARM Cortex A9 MP), usually multi-threaded, and a powerful multi-level cache memory hierarchy on-chip. As most of these systems are battery-powered, the power consumption becomes a critical issue. Achieving high performance and low power consumption is a high complexity challenge where some proposals have been already made. Suarez et al. proposed a new cache hierarchy on-chip, the LP-NUCA (Low Power NUCA), which is able to reduce the access latency taking advantage of NUCA (Non-Uniform Cache Architectures) properties. The key points are decoupling the functionality, and utilizing three specialized networks on-chip. This structure has been proved to be efficient for data hierarchies, achieving a good performance and reducing the energy consumption. On the other hand, instruction caches have different requirements and characteristics than data caches, contradicting the low-power embedded systems requirements, especially in SMT (simultaneous multi-threading) environments. We want to study the benefits of utilizing small tiled caches for the instruction hierarchy, so we propose a new design, ID-LP-NUCAs. Thus, we need to re-evaluate completely our previous design in terms of structure design, interconnection networks (including topologies, flow control and routing), content management (with special interest in hardware/software content allocation policies), and structure sharing. In CMP environments (chip multiprocessors) with parallel workloads, coherence plays an important role, and must be taken into consideration.


Nanophotonics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 937-945
Author(s):  
Ruihuan Zhang ◽  
Yu He ◽  
Yong Zhang ◽  
Shaohua An ◽  
Qingming Zhu ◽  
...  

AbstractUltracompact and low-power-consumption optical switches are desired for high-performance telecommunication networks and data centers. Here, we demonstrate an on-chip power-efficient 2 × 2 thermo-optic switch unit by using a suspended photonic crystal nanobeam structure. A submilliwatt switching power of 0.15 mW is obtained with a tuning efficiency of 7.71 nm/mW in a compact footprint of 60 μm × 16 μm. The bandwidth of the switch is properly designed for a four-level pulse amplitude modulation signal with a 124 Gb/s raw data rate. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed switch is the most power-efficient resonator-based thermo-optic switch unit with the highest tuning efficiency and data ever reported.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 158-168
Author(s):  
Muhammad Raza Naqvi

Mostly communication now days is done through SoC (system on chip) models so, NoC (network on chip) architecture is most appropriate solution for better performance. However, one of major flaws in this architecture is power consumption. To gain high performance through this type of architecture it is necessary to confirm power consumption while designing this. Use of power should be diminished in every region of network chip architecture. Lasting power consumption can be lessened by reaching alterations in network routers and other devices used to form that network. This research mainly focusses on state-of-the-art methods for designing NoC architecture and techniques to reduce power consumption in those architectures like, network architecture, network links between nodes, network design, and routers.


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