OpenMP support for NBTI-induced aging tolerance in MPSoCs

Abstract

Aging effect in next-generation technologies will play a major role in determining system reliability. In particular, wear-out impact due to Negative Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI) will cause an increase in circuit delays of up to 10% in three years [8]. In these systems, NBTI-induced aging can be slowed-down by inserting periods of recovery where the core is functionally idle and gate input is forced to a specific state. This effect can be exploited to impose a given common target lifetime for all the cores. In this paper we present a technique that allows core-wear-out dependent insertion of recovery periods during loop execution in MPSoCs. Performance loss is compensated based on the knowledge of recovery periods. Loop iterations are re-distributed so that cores with longer recovery are allocated less iterations. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.