Variation-Aware Pipelined Cores through Path Shaping and Dynamic Cycle Adjustment: Case Study on a Floating-Point Unit

In this paper, we propose a framework for minimizing variation-induced timing failures in pipelined designs, while limiting any overhead incurred by conventional guardband based schemes. Our approach initially limits the long latency paths (LLPs) and isolates them in as few pipeline stages as possible by shaping the path distribution. Such a strategy, facilitates the adoption of a special unit that predicts the excitation of the isolated LLPs and dynamically allows an extra cycle for the completion of only these error-prone paths. Moreover, our framework performs post-layout dynamic timing analysis based on real operands that we extract from a variety of applications. This allows us to estimate the bit error rates under potential delay variations, while considering the dynamic data dependent path excitation. When applied to the implementation of an IEEE-754 compatible double precision floating-point unit (FPU) in a 45nm process technology, the path shaping helps to reduce the bit error rates on average by 2.71 x compared to the reference design under 8% delay variations. The integrated LLPs prediction unit and the dynamic cycle adjustment avoid such failures and any quality loss at a cost of up-to 0.61% throughput and 0.3% area overheads, while saving 37.95% power on average compared to an FPU with pessimistic margins.