Enabling deep voltage scaling in delay sensitive L1 caches

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

6 Scopus citations

Abstract

Voltage scaling is one of the most effective techniques for providing power savings on a chip-wide basis. However, reducing supply voltage in the presence of process variation introduces significant reliability challenges for large SRAM arrays. In this work, we demonstrate that the emergence of SRAM failures in delay sensitive L1 caches presents significant impediments to voltage scaling. We show that increases in the L1 cache latency would have a detrimental impact on a processor's performance and power consumption at aggressively scaled voltages. We propose techniques for L1 instruction/data caches to enable deep voltage scaling without compromising the L1 cache latency. For the data cache, we employ fault-free windows to adaptively hold the likely accessed data using the fault-free words within each cache line. For the instruction cache, we avoid the addresses that map to defective words by relocating basic blocks. During high voltage operation, both L1 caches have full capability to support high-performance. During low voltage operation, our schemes reduce Vccmin below 400mV. Compared to a conventional cache with a Vccmin of 760mV, we reduce the energy per instruction by 64%.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 46th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, DSN 2016
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages192-202
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9781467388917
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 29 2016
Event46th IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, DSN 2016 - Toulouse, France
Duration: Jun 28 2016Jul 1 2016

Publication series

NameProceedings - 46th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, DSN 2016

Other

Other46th IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, DSN 2016
Country/TerritoryFrance
CityToulouse
Period6/28/167/1/16

Keywords

  • Low power
  • Process variation
  • Reliability
  • SRAM failures

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Software
  • Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality
  • Computer Networks and Communications

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