Suspicious timing error prediction with in-cycle clock gating

Abstract

Conventionally, circuits are designed to add pessimistic timing margin to solve delay variation problems, which guarantees “always correct” operations. However, due to the fact that such a worst-case condition occurs rarely, the traditional pessimistic design method is therefore becoming one of the main obstacles for designers to achieve higher performance and/or ultra-low power consumption. By monitoring timing error occurrence during circuit operation, adaptive timing error detection and recovery methods have gained wide interests recently as a promising solution. As an extension of existing research, in this paper, we propose a suspicious timing error prediction method for performance or energy efficiency improvement in pipeline designs. Experimental results show that with when compared with typical margin designs, the proposed method can 1) achieve up to 1.41X throughput improvement with in-situ timing error prediction ability; and 2) allow the design to be overclocked by up to 1.88X with “always correct” outputs.