Aging-aware voltage scaling

Victor M. van Santen, Hussam Amrouch, Narendra Parihar, Souvik Mahapatra, Jörg Henkel

Abstract: As feature sizes of transistors began to approach atomic levels, aging effects have become one of major concerns when it comes to reliability. Recently, aging effects have become a subject to voltage scaling as the latter entered the sub-μs regime. Hence, aging shifted from a sole long-term (as treated by state-of-the-art) to a short and long-term reliability challenge. This paper interrelates both aging and voltage scaling to explore and quantify for the first time the short-term effects of aging. We propose “aging-awareness” with respect to voltage scaling which is indispensable to sustain runtime reliability. Otherwise, transient errors, caused by the short-term effects of aging, may occur. Compared to state-of-the-art, our aging-aware voltage scaling optimizes for both short-term and long-term aging effects at marginal guardband overhead.