A Standardized Knobs and Monitors RTL2RTL Insertion Methodology for Fine Grain SoC Tuning

Nowadays, sub-45 nm designs are facing the challenges of parametric yield loss and reliability issues. Existing design practices increase the system´s area/power penalty in order to cope with the growing number of design corners and their widening distributions. Our proposed solution is the Standardized Knobs and Monitors (SKM) framework, which enables monitoring and adjusting the circuits at run-time by utilizing power-delay trade-offs. More specifically, we focus on the systematic insertion of digital monitors at the RTL level of design abstraction and demonstrate our approach by using modified crystal ball delay monitor in a real-life wireless application.