Trade-Off Analysis between Timing Error Rate and Power Dissipation for Adaptive Speed Control with Timing Error Prediction

摘要

Timing margin of a chip varies chip by chip due to manufacturing variability, and depends on operating environment and aging. Adaptive speed control with timing error prediction is promising to mitigate the timing margin variation, whereas it inherently has a critical risk of timing error occurrence when a circuit is slowed down. This paper presents how to evaluate the relation between timing error rate and power dissipation in self-adaptive circuits with timing error prediction. The discussion is experimentally validated using adders in subthreshold operation in a 90 nm CMOS process. We show a trade-off between timing error rate and power dissipation, and reveal the dependency of the trade-off on design parameters.