Aging-aware voltage scaling

Abstract

As feature sizes of transistors began to approach atomic levels, aging effects have become one of major concerns when it comes to reliability. Recently, aging effects have become a subject to voltage scaling as the latter entered the sub-μs regime. Hence, aging shifted from a sole long-term (as treated by state-of-the-art) to a short and long-term reliability challenge. This paper interrelates both aging and voltage scaling to explore and quantify for the first time the short-term effects of aging. We propose “aging-awareness” with respect to voltage scaling which is indispensable to sustain runtime reliability. Otherwise, transient errors, caused by the short-term effects of aging, may occur. Compared to state-of-the-art, our aging-aware voltage scaling optimizes for both short-term and long-term aging effects at marginal guardband overhead.