Exploiting Read/Write Asymmetry to Achieve Opportunistic SRAM Voltage Switching in Dual-Supply Near-Threshold Processors

Energy-efficient microprocessors are essential for a wide range of applications. While near-threshold computing is a promising technique to improve energy efficiency, optimal supply demands from logic core and on-chip memory are conflicting. In this paper, we perform static reliability analysis of 6...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of low power electronics and applications 2018-09, Vol.8 (3), p.28
Main Authors: Gu, Yunfei, Yan, Dengxue, Verma, Vaibhav, Wang, Pai, Stan, Mircea, Zhang, Xuan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Architectural engineering
Asymmetry
Automation
Circuits
Computer centers
Computer engineering
dual-supply
Electric potential
Embedded systems
Energy efficiency
International conferences
Microprocessors
Near Threshold Computing (NTC)
Power efficiency
Processors
reliability
Reliability analysis
Static random access memory
Static Random Access Memory (SRAM)
Switching
Transistors
write aggregation buffer
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Summary:Energy-efficient microprocessors are essential for a wide range of applications. While near-threshold computing is a promising technique to improve energy efficiency, optimal supply demands from logic core and on-chip memory are conflicting. In this paper, we perform static reliability analysis of 6T SRAM and discover the variance among different sizing configuration and asymmetric minimum voltage requirements between read and write operations. We leverage this asymmetric property i n near-threshold processors equipped with voltage boosting capability by proposing an opportunistic dual-supply switching scheme with a write aggregation buffer. Our results show that proposed technique improves energy efficiency by more than 21.45% with approximate 10.19% performance speed-up.
ISSN:2079-9268
2079-9268
DOI:10.3390/jlpea8030028