Dynamic fine-grain body biasing of caches with latency and leakage 3T1D-based monitors

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a dynamically tunable fine-grain body biasing mechanism to reduce standby leakage power in first level data-caches under process variations. Accessed physical arrays are forward body biased (FBB) to improve latency while idle (unaccessed) arrays are reverse body biased (RBB) for reducing standby leakage power. The bias voltage to be applied is computed at design time and updated at run-time to counter the negative effects of process variations. This ensures that under all scenarios, the cache will consume the lowest leakage power for the target access latency computed at design-time. A sensor-like hardware mechanism measures the variation in latency and leakage at run-time and this measurement is used to update the bias voltage. The backbone of the hardware used for measurement is a three-transistor one-diode(3T1D)DRAM cell embedded into a regular cache array. By measuring the access and retention time of the 3T1D cell, we show that it is possible to classify cache arrays based on run-time latency/leakage profiles. Our technique reduces leakage energy consumption and access latency of the cache on an average by 20% & 18% respectively. Finally we show that our technique will improve parametric yield by a maximum of 38% for worst-case scenario.