An On-line Reliability Emulation Framework

Abstract

Technology scaling made reliability a primary concern for integrated circuits. Increased power and temperature exasperate the impact of degradation phenomena and shorten processors lifetime. This issue is particularly dramatic for mobile processors, characterized by variable workload and environmental conditions. Due to the different time scales at which reliability phenomena and computation happens, state-of-theartDRM solutions are evaluated using high-level workload and system models. To enable the design of workload-aware DRM with accurate reliability models, in this work we propose a software framework for virtualizing the processors reliability.Our framework captures the effect of variable workload and environmental conditions and allows to emulate longer degradation in a short time scale. We implement the framework on a realAndroid device and exploit it to enable workload-aware DynamicReliability Management (DRM).