A cost-effective substantial-impact-filter based method to tolerate voltage emergencies

Supply voltage fluctuation caused by inductive noises has become a critical problem in microprocessor design. A voltage emergency occurs when supply voltage variation exceeds the acceptable voltage margin, jeopardizing the microprocessor reliability. Existing techniques assume all voltage emergencies would definitely lead to incorrect program execution and prudently activate rollbacks or flushes to recover, and consequently incur high performance overhead. We observe that not all voltage emergencies result in external visible errors, which can be exploited to avoid unnecessary protection. In this paper, we propose a substantial-impact-filter based method to tolerate voltage emergencies, including three key techniques: 1) Analyze the architecture-level masking of voltage emergencies during program execution; 2) Propose a metric intermittent vulnerability factor for intermittent timing faults (IV F_itf) to quantitatively estimate the vulnerability of microprocessor structures (load/store queue and register file) to voltage emergencies; 3) Propose a substantial-impact-filter based method to handle voltage emergencies. Experimental results demonstrate our approach gains back nearly 57% of the performance loss compared with the once-occur-then-rollback approach.