Mitigating NBTI Degradation on FinFET GPUs through Exploiting Device Heterogeneity

Abstract

Recent experimental studies reveal that FinFET devices commercialized in recent years tend to suffer from more severe NBTI degradation compared to planar transistors, necessitating effective techniques on processors built with FinFET for endurable operations. We propose to address this problem by exploiting the device heterogeneity and leveraging the slower NBTI aging rate manifested on the planar devices. We focus on modern graphics processing units in this study due to their wide usage in the current community. We validate the effectiveness of the technique by applying it to the warp scheduler and demonstrate NBTI degradation is considerably alleviated with slight performance overhead.