Design and Synthesis of Self-Healing Memristive Circuits for Timing Resilient Processor Design

Modern microprocessors suffer from significant on-chip variation at the advanced technology nodes. The development of CMOS-compatible memristive devices has brought nonvolatile capability into silicon technology. This paper explores new applications for memristive devices to resolve performance degradations that result from process variation. Novel self-healing flip-flop and clock buffers are developed to automatically detect timing violation and to perform timing recovery by tuning the resistance values of memristor devices. To incorporate the circuit techniques into VLSI circuits design, novel device placement and tuning algorithms have been developed. The proposed design methodology is demonstrated in a 45-nm fast Fourier transform processor design. Our test results show that performance gains of up to 20% can be achieved using the proposed self-healing circuits, with only 1% area