HTD: A Light-Weight Holosymmetrical Transition Detector Based In-situ Timing Monitoring Technique for Wide-Voltage-Range in 40nm CMOS

摘要

To eliminate the worst-case timing margins, a 13-transistor holosymmetrical transition detector (HTD) is proposed for use in timing variation resilient systems. The HTD achieves low overhead and wide-voltage-range operation via monitoring the discharge at the floating node of two-stage CMOS inverters. Using local detection and global clock stalling, the system is stalled immediately for one cycle when an error occurs, allowing the variation resilient technique to be integrated into any circuits without architectural changes. Plus, there is no need of an error recovery mechanism by keeping the system working at the point before the first failure (PBFF) and utilizing the time-borrowing characteristics of the latch. Applied on an 8th-order filter test chip in 40nm CMOS process, without changing the system architecture, chip's measurement results demonstrate that it improves energy efficiency by 45.6%/28.1% and throughput by 179.31%/28.2% in near-V_(TH) (0.474V)/super-V_(TH) (1.1V) while incurring a 4.37% area overhead compared to a baseline design.