Advanced technologies such as sub-45nm CMOS and 3D integration are known to have more accelerated and increased number of reliability failure mechanisms. Classical reliability assessment methodology, which assumes ad-hoc failure criteria and worst-case for all influencing dynamic aspects, is no longer viable in these technologies. In this paper, the authors advocate that managing temperature and reliability at run-time is necessary to overcome this reliability-wall without incurring significant cost penalty. Nonlinear nature of modern systems, however, makes the run-time control very challenging. The authors suggest that full cost-consciousness requires a truly proactive controller that can efficiently manage system slack with future in perspective. This paper introduces the concept of “gas-pedal,” which enhances the effectiveness of the proactive controller in minimizing the cost without sacrificing the hard guarantees required by the constraints. Reliability-aware dynamic energy management of a processor running AVC motion compensation task is used as a motivational case study to illustrate the proposed concepts.
