Asymmetric Aging Effect on Modern Microprocessors
Abstract
Reliability, a crucial requirement in any modern microprocessor, assures correct execution over its lifetime. As mission critical components are becoming common in commodity systems, the demand for reliable processing continues to grow. The latest process technologies have aggravated the situation by causing microprocessors to be highly vulnerable to reliability concerns. This talk presents our study on the asymmetric aging phenomenon, which is a major reliability concern in advanced process nodes. In this phenomenon, logical elements and memory cells suffer from unequal timing degradation over their lifetimes and, consequently, raise reliability concerns. Previousdesign approaches attempted handline asymmetric aging from a circuit or physical design viewpoint, but these solutions were quite limited and suboptimal. In this talk, an asymmetric aging-aware microarchitecture is introduced that aims to reduce the phenomenon’s impact. In addition, a design flow and tool to minimize asymmetric aging in data-path structures is introduced. The tool can be integrated into standard design flows of large-scale circuits. Experimental analysis reveals the approach eliminates reliability concerns while introducing minor overhead.
Short Biography
Freddy Gabbay received his B.Sc., M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel. In 1998, he worked as a researcher at Intel’s Microprocessor Research Lab. In 1999 he joined Mellanox Technologies and held various positions in leading switch product line architecture and ASIC design. In 2003, he joined Freescale Semiconductor as a senior design manager and led the design of baseband ASIC products. In 2012 he rejoined Mellanox Technologies where he served as Vice President of Chip Design. Today he is an associate professor and the Dean of Engineering Faculty at the Ruppin Academic Center, Emek Hefer, Israel. Prof. Gabbay also serves as an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel. His research interests include VLSI design, microelectronics, computer architecture, machine learning and domain-specific accelerators. Prof. Gabbay holds 19 patents and is a senior member of IEEE.