The split register file

Technology scaling requires lowering Vcc due to power constraints. Unfortunately, permanent faulty bit rates grow due to the higher impact of process variations at low Vcc, especially in the register file whose critical timing limits circuit optimizations. This paper proposes a novel register file design based on splitting registers and discarding faulty blocks to increase the number of registers available. By increasing the number of registers available higher performance can be obtained and yield increases because a larger number of processors reaches the minimum number of registers required to operate.