Exploiting narrow-width values for process variationtolerant 3-D microprocessors

Abstract

Process variation is a challenging problem in 3D microprocessors, since it adversely affects performance, power, and reliability of 3D microprocessors, which in turn results in yield losses. In this paper, we propose a novel architectural scheme that exploits the narrow-width value for yield improvement of last-level caches in 3D microprocessors. In a energy-/performance-efficient manner, our proposed scheme improves cache yield by 58.7% and 17.3% compared to the baseline and the naïve way-reduction scheme (that simply discards faulty cache lines), respectively.