NBTI tolerant microarchitecture design in the presence of process variation

Negative bias temperature instability (NBTI), which reduces the lifetime of PMOS transistors, is becoming a growing reliability concern for sub-micrometer CMOS technologies. Parametric variation introduced by nano-scale device fabrication inaccuracy can exacerbate the PMOS transistor wear-out problem and further reduce the reliable lifetime of microprocessors. In this work, we propose microarchitecture design techniques to combat the combined effect of NBTI and process variation (PV) on the reliability of high-performance microprocessors. Experimental evaluation shows our proposed process variation aware (PV-aware) NBTI tolerant microarchitecture design techniques can considerably improve the lifetime of reliability operation while achieving an attractive trade-off with performance and power.