Process-Driven Variability Analysis of Single and Multiple Voltage–Frequency Island Latency-Constrained Systems

The problem of determining bounds for application completion times running on generic systems comprising single or multiple voltage-frequency islands (VFIs) with arbitrary topologies is addressed in the context of manufacturing-process-driven variability. The approach provides an exact solution for the system-level timing yield in synchronous single-voltage (SSV) and VFI systems with an underlying tree-based topology and a tight upper bound for generic non-tree-based topologies. The results show that: 1) timing yield for the overall source-to-sink completion time for generic systems can be modeled in an exact manner for both SSV and VFI systems and 2) multiple-VFI latency-constrained systems can achieve up to two times higher timing yield than their SSV counterparts. The results are formally proven and are supported by experimental results on two embedded applications, namely, a software-defined radio and a Moving Pictures Expert Group 2 encoder.