SRAM based Opportunistic Energy Efficiency Improvement in Dual-Supply Near-Threshold Processors

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 confiicting. In this paper, we perform reliability analysis of 6T SRAM and discover imbalanced minimum voltage requirements between read and write operations. We leverage this imbalance 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 18% with approximate 8.54% performance speed-up.