Implications of variability on resilient design

Abstract

System-on-chip designs must take into account a large number of sources of variability in order to be manufacturable with suitable yield. Resilient design must begin with careful attention to these methods, but must also move beyond them. This paper looks at the need to consider dynamic aging variation for BTI effects as part of an overall resilient design methodology. Note that this aging tolerance will be needed even for fault tolerant approaches such as lockstep or triple-modular redundancy, because the aging process will occur in all copies of a design at roughly the same rate.