On the premises and prospects of timing speculation

Rong Ye, Feng Yuan, Jie Zhang, Qiang Xu

Abstract: Timing speculation (TS), being able to detect and correct circuit timing errors at runtime, is a promising alternative solution to mitigate the ever-increasing variation effects in nanometer circuits. The potential energy-efficiency improvement, however, is limited by the circuit 'timing wall", a critical operating point caused by conventional circuit optimization techniques (e.g., gate sizing). With a given circuit netlist, we study the bound of the potential benefits provided by TS techniques in this work, which facilitate designers to decide whether it worths the effort to implement a timing-speculative circuit. Experimental results on benchmark circuits demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.