Design Flows for Resilient Energy-Efficient Systems

摘要

Aggressive energy reduction is a mandatory requirement for many computing systems used in energy-constrained Internet of Things (IoT) platforms. Operating circuits at supply voltages close to the threshold voltage of the transistors, commonly known as near-threshold computing, is a promising approach to achieve such low energy goals. However, maintaining the resiliency at such low supply voltages is very challenging as the impacts of variability sources could be orders of magnitude larger compared the nominal voltage. This mandates new design automation paradigms to ensure resiliency for aggressively voltage scaled circuits. In this work, we introduce design flows and strategies to improve the resiliency and energy efficiency of circuits at near-thresohold voltage region.