The occupancy of caches has tended to be dominated by the logic bit value '0' approximately 75% of the time. Periodic bit flipping can reduce this to 50%. Combining cache power saving strategies with bit flipping can lower the effective logic bit value '0' occupancy ratios even further. We investigate how Negative Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI) affects different power saving cache strategies employing symmetric and asymmetric 6-transistor (6T) and 8T Static Random Access Memory (SRAM) cells. We notice that greater than 38% to 66% of the recovery in stability parameters (SNM and WNM) under different power saving cache strategies have been achieved for different SRAM cells based caches. We also study the process variations effect along with NBTI for 32nm and 45nm technology node. It is observed that the rate of recovery in asymmetric SRAM cells based caches is slightly higher than the symmetric and 8T SRAM cells based caches.

3D integration of multiple active layers into a single chip is a viable technique that greatly reduces the length of global wires by providing vertical connections between layers. However, dissipating the heat generated in the 3D chips possesses a major challenge to the success of the technology and is the subject of active current research. Since the generated heat degrades the performance of the chip, thermally insensitive/adaptive circuit design techniques are required for better overall system performance. In this paper, we propose a thermally adaptive 3D clocking scheme that dynamically adjusts the driving strengths of the clock buffers to reduce the clock skew between terminals. We investigate the relative merits and demerits of two alternative clock tree topologies in this work. Simulation results demonstrate that our adaptive technique is capable of reducing the skew by 61.65% on the average, leading to much improved clock synchronization and design performance in the 3D realm.

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Abstract-Degradation of device parameters over the lifetime of a system is emerging as a significant threat to system reliability. Among the aging mechanisms, wearout resulting from NBTI is of particular concern in deep submicron technology generations. To facilitate architectural level aging analysis, a tool capable of evaluating NBTI vulnerabilities early in the design cycle has been developed. The tool includes workload-based temperature and performance degradation analysis across a variety of technologies and operating conditions, revealing a complex interplay between factors influencing NBTI timing degradation.