Browsing by Author "Chang, Pei-Yao"

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A 0.48V 0.57nJ/Pixel Video-Recording SoC in 65nm CMOS
(2013-01-01)
Lin, Tay-Jyi
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Chien, Cheng-An
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Chang, Pei-Yao
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Chen, Ching-Wen
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Wang, Po-Hao
Variation-Aware and Adaptive-Latency Accesses for Reliable Low Voltage Caches
(2013)
Wang, Po-Hao
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Cheng, Wei-Chung
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Yu, Yung-Hui
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Kao, Tang-Chieh
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Tsai, Chi-Lun
Contemporary cache is known for consuming a large part of total power in microprocessors. Voltage scaling had been used to reduce the power consumption of the cache. However, due to the impact of variations, SRAM cells of the cache could potentially fail when voltage dropping. To against variations, we need to increase the supply voltage for the safety margin, thus the cache costs large energy consumption. For eliminating the voltage safety margin, some prior works for SRAM failure tolerance designs were proposed. These schemes will result in worse energy consumption and cannot deal with dynamic variations. They still have a safety margin to resist dynamic variations. With the supply voltage scaling down, we find out that the major reason of failures is that some slow cells have longer latency. We call these cell faults as "latency fault". If each cache line can be accessed in an appropriate access time, the slower cells could be reused but not disable them. We propose a VAL-Cache adapting the access time to tolerate latency faults and which is able to scale down the voltage. And we also propose the latency-fault detector to detect latency faults at run-time so as to tolerate both static and dynamic variations. Our experimental results on Mibench and 0xbench benchmarks demonstrate that the energy consumption can be reduced 10%similar to 18% in average at a cost of acceptable performance loss.
Zero-Counting and Adaptive-Latency Cache Using a Voltage-Guardband Breakthrough for Energy-Efficient Operations
(2016-10)
Wang, Po-Hao
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Cheng, Wei-Chung
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Yu, Yung-Hui
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Kao, Tang-Chieh
;
Tsai, Chi-Lun
In modern embedded processor systems, energy efficiency is a critical issue. Unfortunately, to avoid cache memory (SRAM) faults from dynamic variations, caches generally operate at an elevated voltage to build a safety guardband that decreases energy efficiency. To address this issue, tolerating SRAM faults to eliminate the safety of a guardband without frequency scaling may be a viable solution. This study investigates the characteristics of low-voltage 8 T SRAM faults and demonstrates that most SRAM faults are typically caused by insufficient access times with variation effects and significantly reduced voltages. Thus, we propose an access-time fault-tolerant cache design based on a type of 8 T SRAM known as zero-counting and adaptive-latency cache (ZCAL cache), which can tolerate numerous access-time faults. ZCAL caches detect access-time faults dynamically using a lightweight error detection code ("0" counting) because access-time faults occur only when reading "0" bits on the 8 T SRAM; the cache then adapts its access time to tolerate the access-time faults with new cache management processes. With the ZCAL cache, the experimental results from the MiBench benchmarks indicate that the energy efficiency is improved by 17% on average and that the energy consumption is reduced by 22% from 0.76 to 0.63 V.