ICE-RADAR: In-situ, Cost-Effective Razor Flip-Flop Deployment for Aging Resilience

Abstract

Device aging, which causes significant loss on circuit performance and lifetime, has been a primary factor in reliability degradation of nanoscale designs. In this paper, we propose to exploit timing speculation for aging resilience, based on deploying Razor flip-flops. By formulating the problem based on Boolean satisfiability, we can determine the optimal deployment of Razor flip-flops, such that maximum degree of aging resilience can be achieved in a cost-effective manner. Experimental results show that more than 50% of aging-induced performance degradation can be recovered, while reducing the number of required Razor flip-flops by more than 3X, as compared to the case of naive Razor flip-flop deployment.