Modeling and experimental demonstration of accelerated self-healing techniques

In this paper we postulate that future electronics systems will use sleep time as an active recovery period essential for their overall performance. Our hypothesis is that by explicitly controlling the ratio of sleep vs. active and sleep conditions (e.g. higher temperatures, negative voltages), we can deeply rejuvenate electronic systems periodically to improve their metrics. We perform a series of stress and recovery experiments using commercial FPGAs to demonstrate several cases where we bring stressed chips back to within 90% of their original margin by actively rejuvenating for only 1/4 of the stress time. We validate our experiments against extracted models and present potential applications to multi-core systems.