[ACM Press the 14th ACM/IEEE international symposium - San Fancisco, CA, USA (2009.08.19-2009.08.21)] Proceedings of the 14th ACM/IEEE international symposium on Low power electronics and design - ISLPED '09 - NBTI-aware power gating for concurrent leakage and aging optimization

✍ Scribed by Calimera, Andrea; Macii, Enrico; Poncino, Massimo

• Book ID: 120988917
• Publisher: ACM Press
• Year: 2009
• Weight: 360 KB
• Category: Article
• ISBN: 1605586846
• DOI: 10.1145/1594233.1594264

✦ Synopsis

Power and reliability are known to be intrinsically conflicting metrics: traditional solutions to improve reliability such as redundancy, increase of voltage levels, and up-sizing of critical devices do contrast with traditional low-power solutions, which rely on small devices and scaled supply voltages. The emergence of Negative Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI) as the most relevant source of unreliability in sub-90nm technologies has even exacerbated this incompatibility of the two metrics: NBTI manifests itself as an increase of the propagation delay over time, which adds up to the delay penalty introduced by most low-power design solutions. In this work, we show how the most widely adopted leakage reduction solution, that is, power-gating, can overcome this conflict, and how it can be used to naturally reduce the effects of NBTI on delay. Based on this important property, we present a methodology for NBTI-aware power gating that allows synthesizing low-leakage circuits with maximum lifetime.