49,092 research outputs found
Diagnosis of Multiple-Voltage Design with Bridge Defect
No full textMultiple voltage is an effective dynamic power reduction design technique commonly used in low-power ICs. To the best of our knowledge, there is no reported work for diagnosing multiple-voltage enabled ICs, and the aim of this paper is to propose a method for diagnosing bridge defects in such ICs. By using synthesized ISCAS benchmarks, with realistic extracted bridges and a parametric fault model, this paper investigates the impact of varying supply voltage on the accuracy of diagnosis and demonstrates how the additional voltage settings can be leveraged to improve the diagnosis resolution through a novel multivoltage diagnosis algorithm. In addition, it also identifies the most useful voltage settings to reduce diagnosis cost by eliminating tests at certain voltage setting using the proposed multivoltage diagnosis approach, thereby achieving high diagnosis accuracy at reduced cost
Numerically efficient modeling of CNT transistors with ballistic and non-ballistic effects for circuit simulation
No full textThis paper presents an efficient carbon nanotube (CNT) transistor modeling technique which is based on cubic spline approximation of the non-equilibrium mobile charge density. The approximation facilitates the solution of the selfconsistent voltage equation in a carbon nanotube so that calculation of the CNT drain-source current is accelerated by at least two orders of magnitude. A salient feature of the proposed technique is its ability to incorporate both ballistic and nonballistic transport effects without a significant computational cost. The proposed models have been extensively validated against reported CNT ballistic and non-ballistic transport theories and experimental results
Scan architecture with mutually exclusive scan segment activation for shift and capture power reduction
No full textPower dissipation during scan testing is becoming an important concern as design sizes and gate densities increase. While several approaches have been recently proposed for reducing power dissipation during the shift cycle (minimum transition don't care fill, special scan cells and scan chain partitioning), very little work has been carried out towards reducing the peak power during test response capture and the few existing approaches for reducing capture power rely on complex ATPG algorithms. This paper proposes a scan architecture with mutually exclusive scan segment activation which overcomes the shortcomings of previous approaches. The proposed architecture achieves both shift and capture power reduction with no impact on the performance of the design, and with minimal impact on area and testing time (typically 2-3%). An algorithmic procedure for assigning flip-flips to scan segments enables reuse of test patterns generated by standard ATPG tools. An implementation of the proposed method had been integrated into an automated design flow using commercial synthesis and simulation tools which was used on a wide range of benchmark designs. Reductions up to 57% in average power, and up to 44% and 34% in peak power dissipation during shift and capture cycles, respectively, were obtained when using two scan segments. Increasing the number of scan segments to six leads to reductions of 96% and 80% in average power and respectively maximum number of simultaneous transitions
Analogue Filter IP Cores for Design Reuse
No full textThis paper addresses important considerations concerning the design of analogue filters, to ensure their suitability for use in a system on chip environment as intellectual property filter cores. We argue that switched-current is the most suitable circuit design technique and furthermore that the wave filter design methodology is favourable over an integrator approach. To speed up the design process some level of automation is clearly necessary and a system implemented in the SKILL language and within the Cadence Design Framework is particularly attractive given the access to powerful circuit analysis tools. A design flow is presented encompassing all of these attributes
Impact of Multicycled Scheduling on Power-Area Tradeoffs in Behavioural Synthesis
No full textMulticycling is a widely investigated technique for performance optimisation in behavioural synthesis. It allows an operation to execute over two or more control steps with the aim of increasing the performance and/or minimising the power consumption. This paper presents a new time-constrained scheduling (TCS) algorithm that takes into account the combined influence of clock period and the multicycled functional units execution time on the quality of the schedules in terms of power and area. It is shown that it is possible to produce a set of solutions that have similar power consumptions, however differ in terms of resource requirements, yet meeting the imposed real-time constraint. Furthermore, extensive experiments on behavioural benchmarks show that the proposed approach is capable of obtaining schedules with single supply domain that have identical resource requirements and comparable power consumption to schedules obtained using multiple supply voltages, further reducing the design complexity
Combined Time and Information Redundancy for SEU-Tolerance in Energy-Efficient Real-Time Systems
No full textRecently the trade-off between energy consumption and fault-tolerance in real-time systems has been highlighted. These works have focused on dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) to reduce dynamic energy dissipation and on time redundancy to achieve transient-fault tolerance. While the time redundancy technique exploits the available slack time to increase the fault-tolerance by performing recovery executions, DVS exploits slack time to save energy. Therefore we believe there is a resource conflict between the time-redundancy technique and DVS. The first aim of this paper is to propose the usage of information redundancy to solve this problem. We demonstrate through analytical and experimental studies that it is possible to achieve both higher transient fault-tolerance (tolerance to single event upsets (SEU)) and less energy using a combination of information and time redundancy when compared with using time redundancy alone. The second aim of this paper is to analyze the interplay of transient-fault tolerance (SEU-tolerance) and adaptive body biasing (ABB) used to reduce static leakage energy, which has not been addressed in previous studies. We show that the same technique (i.e. the combination of time and information redundancy) is applicable to ABB-enabled systems and provides more advantages than time redundancy alone
Workload-Ahead-Driven Online Energy Minimization Techniques for Battery-Powered Embedded Systems with Time-Constraints
No full textThis paper proposes a new online voltage scaling (VS) technique for battery-powered embedded systems with real-time constraints. The VS technique takes into account the tasks execution times and discharge currents to further reduce the battery charge consumption when compared to the recently reported slack forwarding technique, whilst maintaining low online complexity of O(1). Furthermore, we investigate the impact of online rescheduling and remapping on the battery charge consumption for tasks with data dependency which has not been explicitly addressed in the literature and propose a novel rescheduling/remapping technique. We demonstrate and compare the efficiency of the presented techniques using seven real-life benchmarks and numerous automatically generated examples
Variation Resilient Adaptive Controller for Subthreshold Circuits
No full textSubthreshold logic is showing good promise as a viable ultra-low-power circuit design technique for power-limited applications. For this design technique to gain widespread adoption, one of the most pressing concerns is how to improve the robustness of subthreshold logic to process and temperature variations. We propose a variation resilient adaptive controller for subthreshold circuits with the following novel features: new sensor based on time-to-digital converter for capturing the variations accurately as digital signatures, and an all-digital DC-DC converter incorporating the sensor capable of generating an operating operating Vdd from 0V to 1.2V with a resolution of 18.75mV, suitable for subthreshold circuit operation. The benefits of the proposed controller is reflected with energy improvement of up to 55% compared to when no controller is employed. The detailed implementation and validation of the proposed controller is discussed
Quasi-Static Voltage Scaling for Energy Minimization with Time Constraints
No full textSupply voltage scaling and adaptive body-biasing are important tech-niques that help to reduce the energy dissipation of embedded systems. This is achieved by dynamically adjusting the voltage and performance settings according to the application needs. In order to take full ad-vantage of slack that arises from variations in the execution time, it is important to recalculate the voltage (performance) settings during run-time, i.e., online. However, voltage scaling (VS) is computationally ex-pensive, and thus significantly hampers the possible energy savings. To overcome the online complexity, we propose a quasi-static voltage scal-ing scheme, with a constant online time complexity O(1). This allows to increase the exploitable slack as well as to avoid the energy dissipated due to online recalculation of the voltage settings. We conduct several experiments that demonstrate the advantages of the proposed technique over the previously published voltage scaling approaches
- …
