An area-overhead-oriented monitoring-path selection algorithm for suspicious timing error prediction

As process technologies advance, the importance of timing error correction techniques is increasing as well. In this paper, We propose an area-overhead-oriented monitoring-path selection algorithm for suspicious timing error prediction circuits (STEPCs). STEPC predicts timing errors by monitoring the middle points of several speed-paths in a circuit. However, we need many STEPCs with a high area overhead to predict timing errors in an overall circuit. Our proposed method moves the STEPC insertion positions to minimize the number of inserted STEPCs. We apply a max-flow and min-cut approach to determine the optimal positions of inserted STEPCs. Our proposed algorithm reduces the required number of STEPCs to 1/19 and their area to 1/5 compared with a naive algorithm. Furthermore, our algorithm realizes 2.25X overclocking compared with just inserting STEPCs into several speed-paths.