Reducing the Impact of Process Variability with Prefetching and Criticality-Based Resource Allocation

摘要

A major problem facing the computer and semi-conductor industries is the increasing amount of CMOS process variability [1, 3]. Variability in low-level circuit parameters, such as transistor gate length and gate oxide thickness, complicates system design by introducing uncertainty about how a fabricated system will perform. Although a circuit or chip is designed to run at a nominal clock frequency, the fabricated implementation may vary far from this expected performance.