Imperial College London > Talks@ee.imperial > Featured talks > Semiconductor Life Extensions through Reconfiguration (using reconfiguration and adaptivity to deal with variation, aging, and power reduction)

Semiconductor Life Extensions through Reconfiguration (using reconfiguration and adaptivity to deal with variation, aging, and power reduction)

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If you have a question about this talk, please contact Professor Peter Cheung.

As we continue to scale silicon technologies, the statistical behavior of individual dopants, atoms, and bonds leads to an increased rate of defects, high variation in device characteristics, and increased changes in the characteristics of devices during in-field operation. Advanced integrated circuits will be like snowflakes—each unique and changing throughout its lifetime. Adding static margins to tolerate high device variance and potential device degradation prevents aggressive voltage scaling to reduce energy. Post-fabrication configuration in reconfigurable components, such as FPG As, provides an opportunity to avoid the high costs of static margins. Rather than assuming worst-case device characteristics, we can deploy devices based on their fabricated or aged characteristics. This allows us to place the high-speed/leaky devices as needed on critical paths and slower/less-leaky devices on non-critical paths. As a result, it becomes possible to meet system timing requirements at lower voltages than conservative margins. Furthermore, we can reassign computations to devices in the field as device characteristics change—-extending the lifetime of individual components. As the magnitude of aging effects increase, the mapping of functions to resources becomes an adaptive process that is continually refined in-system, throughout the lifetime of the component. Preliminary estimates suggest we can at least reduce energy by a factor of two without changing FPGA architectures or a factor 3 with suitable device sizing and this extends minimum energy reduction by at least one process generation.

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