Minimum-Energy Operation Via Error Resiliency

Author

Abdallah, Rami A. ; Shanbhag, Naresh R.

Author_Institution

ECE Dept., Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

Volume

2

Issue

4

fYear

2010

Firstpage

115

Lastpage

118

Abstract

Error resiliency has demonstrated significant robustness and energy benefits in superthreshold performance-constrained applications (Shanbhag, Proc. Des. Autom. Conf., Jun. 2010). In this letter, we study the impact of error resiliency, in particular algorithmic-noise tolerance (ANT) (Hedge and Shanbhag, IEEE Trans. VLSI Syst., vol. 17, no. 8, pp. 813-823, Dec. 2001), in subthreshold energy-constrained applications where designs are operated at their minimum-energy operating point (MEOP) and error resiliency is still under-explored. We show that the MEOP in subthreshold designs can be further lowered by employing frequency overscaling (FOS) or voltage overscaling (VOS) and ANT to correct for intermittent timing errors. We demonstrate a 26% reduction in the total energy of an ANT-based filter in a commercial 130-nm CMOS process along with increased robustness to voltage variations.

Keywords

CMOS integrated circuits; fault tolerant computing; integrated circuit noise; low-power electronics; power aware computing; ANT-based filter; CMOS process; FOS; MEOP; VOS; algorithmic-noise tolerance; error resiliency; frequency overscaling; minimum-energy operating point; size 130 nm; subthreshold energy-constrained application; voltage overscaling; CMOS process; Dynamic voltage scaling; Energy consumption; Finite impulse response filter; Low power electronics; Robustness; Signal to noise ratio; Timing; Algorithmic-noise tolerance; error resiliency; subthreshold operation; ultra low-power electronics; voltage overscaling;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Embedded Systems Letters, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1943-0663

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/LES.2010.2098330

Filename

5661804