EnAAM: Energy-efficient anti-aging for on-chip video memories

Negative Biased Temperature Instability-induced aging has emerged as one of the critical reliability threats in the nano-era. In this paper, we propose a microarchitectural-level technique for mitigating aging of on-chip SRAM-based memories. The goal is to achieve balanced aging of all memory cells at minimal energy overhead, leading to a longer lifetime. For a configurable and energy-efficient design, we perform aging and energy analysis of different aging balancing circuits. This analysis is leveraged to design a novel energy-efficient anti-aging memory architecture. Our architecture employs a configurable anti-aging controller that leverages the data characteristics to dynamically select (1) at what time instant the aging balancing circuit should be activated, and (2) on which SRAM cells aging balancing should be applied. Our experiments demonstrate significant aging improvements while providing up to 30% energy savings.