Online timing variation tolerance for digital integrated circuits

Ensuring safe timing increasingly becomes a paramount challenge with the technology scaling to nanoscale. This study aims to provide timing variation detection and tolerance solutions. We first propose a versatile online timing variation detection scheme which can handle multiple types of faults. With the capability of detection, we further propose two tolerance schemes to eliminate runtime margin in DVFS applications and improve lifetime reliability under progressive aging mechanisms, respectively. Lastly, given the more complicated PVT variations whose primary circuit implication is also timing variations, we propose TEA-TM, a novel architectural scheme to reduce timing emergencies. Collectively, we aims to build a comprehensive framework for timing variation tolerance and demonstrate several specific applications.