Version 1
: Received: 16 June 2018 / Approved: 18 June 2018 / Online: 18 June 2018 (15:48:37 CEST)
Version 2
: Received: 4 September 2018 / Approved: 5 September 2018 / Online: 5 September 2018 (05:45:16 CEST)
Gu, Y.; Yan, D.; Verma, V.; Wang, P.; Stan, M.R.; Zhang, X. Exploiting Read/Write Asymmetry to Achieve Opportunistic SRAM Voltage Switching in Dual-Supply Near-Threshold Processors. J. Low Power Electron. Appl.2018, 8, 28.
Gu, Y.; Yan, D.; Verma, V.; Wang, P.; Stan, M.R.; Zhang, X. Exploiting Read/Write Asymmetry to Achieve Opportunistic SRAM Voltage Switching in Dual-Supply Near-Threshold Processors. J. Low Power Electron. Appl. 2018, 8, 28.
Gu, Y.; Yan, D.; Verma, V.; Wang, P.; Stan, M.R.; Zhang, X. Exploiting Read/Write Asymmetry to Achieve Opportunistic SRAM Voltage Switching in Dual-Supply Near-Threshold Processors. J. Low Power Electron. Appl.2018, 8, 28.
Gu, Y.; Yan, D.; Verma, V.; Wang, P.; Stan, M.R.; Zhang, X. Exploiting Read/Write Asymmetry to Achieve Opportunistic SRAM Voltage Switching in Dual-Supply Near-Threshold Processors. J. Low Power Electron. Appl. 2018, 8, 28.
Abstract
Energy-efficient microprocessors are essential for a wide range of applications. While near-threshold computing is a promising technique to improve energy efficiency, optimal supply demands from logic core and on-chip memory are conflicting. In this paper, we perform static reliability analysis of 6T SRAM and discover the variance among different sizing configuration and asymmetric minimum voltage requirements between read and write operations. We leverage this asymmetric property in near-threshold processors equipped with voltage boosting capability by proposing an opportunistic dual-supply switching scheme with a write aggregation buffer. Our results show that proposed technique improves energy efficiency by more than 21.45% with approximate 10.19% performance speed-up.
Keywords
near threshold computing (NTC); dual-supply; static random access memory (SRAM); reliability; write aggregation buffer
Subject
Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
