A. Gebregiorgis, M. Golanbari, S. Kiamehr, Fabian Oboril, M. Tahoori
{"title":"Maximizing Energy Efficiency in NTC by Variation-Aware Microprocessor Pipeline Optimization","authors":"A. Gebregiorgis, M. Golanbari, S. Kiamehr, Fabian Oboril, M. Tahoori","doi":"10.1145/2934583.2934635","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Near threshold computing (NTC) has the potential to reduce the energy consumption by orders of magnitude. However, NTC designs suffer from a higher sensitivity to process variation and substantial performance degradation. In NTC, process variation affects the delays of different pipeline stages significantly, resulting in energy-inefficient designs. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient variation-aware processor pipeline optimization, in which the pipeline stages are balanced by considering the impact of process variation during earlier design phases. This can lead to a well-balanced design and significant improvement in energy-efficiency. For this purpose, we employ an iterative variation-aware synthesis flow in which the synthesis tool is provided with variation information. Since the impact of process variation is considered during synthesis, our technique can improve the energy-efficiency by avoiding pessimistic guard band. Simulation results show that our technique can improve the energy-efficiency of OpenSPARC and FabScalar cores by 55% and 85%, respectively.","PeriodicalId":142716,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2016 International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2016-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"9","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Proceedings of the 2016 International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2934583.2934635","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 9
Abstract
Near threshold computing (NTC) has the potential to reduce the energy consumption by orders of magnitude. However, NTC designs suffer from a higher sensitivity to process variation and substantial performance degradation. In NTC, process variation affects the delays of different pipeline stages significantly, resulting in energy-inefficient designs. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient variation-aware processor pipeline optimization, in which the pipeline stages are balanced by considering the impact of process variation during earlier design phases. This can lead to a well-balanced design and significant improvement in energy-efficiency. For this purpose, we employ an iterative variation-aware synthesis flow in which the synthesis tool is provided with variation information. Since the impact of process variation is considered during synthesis, our technique can improve the energy-efficiency by avoiding pessimistic guard band. Simulation results show that our technique can improve the energy-efficiency of OpenSPARC and FabScalar cores by 55% and 85%, respectively.