Reducing wearout in embedded processors using proactive fine-grain dynamic runtime adaptation

Abstract

With shrinking feature sizes, transistor aging becomes a reliability challenge for embedded processors. Processes such as NBTI and HCI lead to increasing gate delays and eventually reduced lifetime. Currently, to ensure functionality for a certain lifetime, safety margins are added to the design, which means overdesign and increased costs. To extend lifetime, reduce power and heat, while maintaining the required performance we propose a dynamic runtime adaptation approach, which is based on runtime monitoring of temperature, performance, power and wearout in combination with fine-grained proactive dynamic voltage and frequency scaling. The experimental results presented in this work show lifetime improvements between 63% up to 5×, while the required performance as well as power and temperature constraints are maintained.