Analyzing stability concerns in the presence of variations in Subthreshold SRAM

In this work, we analyse the stability of the SRAM bitcells when operating in subthreshold supply voltages.We propose a new bit cell with higher stability than 6T Bitcell,that is able to discharge the bit lines in 41% less time than the 6T as it's discharge path is only of single transistor

Exploiting Natural On-chip Redundancy for Energy Efficient Memory and Computing

Power density is currently the primary design constraint across most computing segments and the main performance limiting factor. For years, industry has kept power density constant, while increasing frequency, lowering transistors supply (Vdd) and threshold (Vth) voltages. However, Vth scaling has stopped because leakage current is exponentially related to it. Transistor count and integration density keep doubling every process generation (Moore’s Law), but the power budget caps the amount of hardware that can be active at the same time, leading to dark silicon. With each new generation, there are more resources available, but we cannot fully exploit their performance potential. In the last years, different research trends have explored how to cope with dark silicon and unlock the energy efficiency of the chips, including Near-Threshold voltage Computing (NTC) and approximate computing. NTC aggressively lowers Vdd to values near Vth. This allows a substantial reduction in power, as dynamic power scales quadratically with supply voltage. The resultant power reduction could be used to activate more chip resources and potentially achieve performance improvements. Unfortunately, Vdd scaling is limited by the tight functionality margins of on-chip SRAM transistors. When scaling Vdd down to values near-threshold, manufacture-induced parameter variations affect the functionality of SRAM cells, which eventually become not reliable. A large amount of emerging applications, on the other hand, features an intrinsic error-resilience property, tolerating a certain amount of noise. In this context, approximate computing takes advantage of this observation and exploits the gap between the level of accuracy required by the application and the level of accuracy given by the computation, providing that reducing the accuracy translates into an energy gain. However, deciding which instructions and data and which techniques are best suited for approximation still poses a major challenge. This dissertation contributes in these two directions. First, it proposes a new approach to mitigate the impact of SRAM failures due to parameter variation for effective operation at ultra-low voltages. We identify two levels of natural on-chip redundancy: cache level and content level. The first arises because of the replication of blocks in multi-level cache hierarchies. We exploit this redundancy with a cache management policy that allocates blocks to entries taking into account the nature of the cache entry and the use pattern of the block. This policy obtains performance improvements between 2% and 34%, with respect to block disabling, a technique with similar complexity, incurring no additional storage overhead. The latter (content level redundancy) arises because of the redundancy of data in real world applications. We exploit this redundancy compressing cache blocks to fit them in partially functional cache entries. At the cost of a slight overhead increase, we can obtain performance within 2% of that obtained when the cache is built with fault-free cells, even if more than 90% of the cache entries have at least a faulty cell. Then, we analyze how the intrinsic noise tolerance of emerging applications can be exploited to design an approximate Instruction Set Architecture (ISA). Exploiting the ISA redundancy, we explore a set of techniques to approximate the execution of instructions across a set of emerging applications, pointing out the potential of reducing the complexity of the ISA, and the trade-offs of the approach. In a proof-of-concept implementation, the ISA is shrunk in two dimensions: Breadth (i.e., simplifying instructions) and Depth (i.e., dropping instructions). This proof-of-concept shows that energy can be reduced on average 20.6% at around 14.9% accuracy loss

서비스 균등 분배와 고성능을 위한 다중프로세서칩 상의 재구성형 통신 구조

학위논문 (박사)-- 서울대학교 대학원 : 전기·컴퓨터공학부, 2016. 2. 최기영.The chip multiprocessor (CMP) era has long begun due to the diminishing return from instruction-level parallelism (ILP) harvesting techniques, the rising power and temperature from frequency scaling, etc. One powerful processor has been replaced by many less-powerful processors forming a CMP. One of the issues arose from this paradigm shift is the management of communication among the processors. Buses, which has been a common choice for the systems with one or several processors, failed to sustain the increased communication burden of CMPs. Many bus-based improvements including hierarchical buses and bus-matrices, were proposed but eventually, network-on-chip (NoC) has become the de facto standard for designing a CMP system, replacing the bus-based techniques. NoCs strengths over bus mainly come from its capability of conveying multiple transactions simultaneously from different components to the others. The concurrent communications between the cores are conducted by the distributed, yet shared network components, routers. Routers provide cores with services such as bandwidths. One of the design issues in implementing NoC is to distribute these services evenly across all the cores requesting for them. Arbiter is a component that regulates the accesses to shared resources such as channels and buffers. It has the policy under which requests get services in turn from the shared resources so that the requestors dont fall into deadlock or starvation. One of the common policies for an arbiter is the round-robin, where requests get their grant one by one so that fairness is assured among the requestors. When applied to routers in NoC, it fails to provide the fairness because each request goes through multiple routers, thus multiple round-robin arbiters on a transaction route. The cascaded effect of the round-robin arbitration is that the farther a source is from the destination, the less service it gets from the destination. The first part of this thesis addresses this issue, and proposes thus far the simplest yet the most effective way of providing the fairness to all the nodes on NoC. It applies weighted round-robin scheme where the weights are determined at run-time depending on which cores are allocated to applications or threads running on the CMP. RTL implementation and synthesis are done to show the simplicity of the proposed scheme. Simulation with synthetic traffic patterns and SPEC CPU2006 benchmark applications show that the proposed approach results in outstanding equality-of-service characteristics. The second part of this thesis deals with the impact of the reconfigurable communication architecture on the performance of a CMP system. One of the pitfalls of NoC is long access latency due to increased hop count between a source and its destination. For example, NoC with mesh topology has its hop count proportional to its size. Because of this, while being a common choice for CMP, mesh topology is said to be inscalable in terms of the number of cores. Some alternatives to mesh topology exist, one of them being high radix NoCs. They replace short and wide channels of mesh with long and narrow ones achieving fewer hop counts. Another option is to cluster cores so that the dimension of mesh network reduces. The clusters are formed by grouping cores via local communication fabric. The clusters are interconnected by a global communication fabric, often in the shape of mesh topology. Many types of local communication fabric are explored in previous researches, including another NoC with topologies of mesh, ring, etc. However, bus has become one of the most favorable choices for the local connection because of its simplicity. The simplicity leads local communications to be performed with high performance, low chip area, low power consumption, etc. One of the issues in forming core clusters in CMP is their grain size. Tying too many cores into a cluster results in the congestion on the bus, reducing the performance of the local communications. On the other hand, too few cores in a cluster misses the chances of improving system performance by efficient local communications through the bus. It is obvious that the optimal number of cores in a cluster depends on the applications that run on the CMP. Bus reconfiguration with bus segments and switches can be a solution for varying cluster size on a CMP. In addition to the variable cluster sizes, bus reconfiguration has another advantage of processor (not process) migration. Bus reconfiguration can reconnect cores and caches so that the distance between cores and data are reduced dynamically. In this way, data copies and network transactions can be dramatically reduced to improve the system performance. The second part of this thesis addresses this issue and proposes a reconfigurable bus-mesh architecture to accelerate pipelined applications. With the proposed architecture, the data transfer between the successive pipeline stages are done not by data copies but by processor migrations. Systematic management of bus segments and L1 data caches are required to achieve efficient use of the reconfigurability. The proposed architecture is compared with the baseline architecture, which maintains cache coherence with hardware. Multilayer perceptron (MLP), convolutional neural network (CNN), and JPEG decoder are implemented as example pipelined applications using multi-threaded programming model. The in-house full system simulator is implemented and used to measure the performance improvement of the proposed architecture. The experimental results show that 21.75 %, 14.40 %, and 12.74 % execution cycle reductions are achieved for MLP, CNN, and JPEG decoder, respectively.Part I Adaptively Weighted Round-Robin Arbitration for Equality of Service in a Many-Core Network-on-Chip [1] 1 Chapter 1 Introduction 3 Chapter 2 Previous Work 7 Chapter 3 Position-Based Weighted Round-Robin Arbitration 11 Chapter 4 Adaptively Weighted Round-Robin Arbitration 17 4.1 Hardware Implementation for weight update 18 4.2 Arbitration Weight Determination 22 Chapter 5 Experimental Results 25 5.1 Open-Loop Measurements 25 5.2 Closed-Loop Measurements 29 5.3 Hardware Implementation 33 Chapter 6 Conclusion 35 Part II Accelerating Pipelined Applications with Reconfigurable Bus-Mesh Communication Architecture in Chip Multiprocessors 37 Chapter 7 Introduction 39 Chapter 8 Backgrounds and Previous Work 43 8.1 Segmented Bus 43 8.2 CMPs with Reconfigurable Bus-Mesh Communication Architecture 44 8.3 Near-Threshold Computing 48 Chapter 9 Baseline Architecture 51 Chapter 10 Motivation 55 Chapter 11 Reconfigurable Bus-Mesh Architecture 61 11.1 Thread Programming Model 61 11.2 Cluster Size 64 11.3 Organizing Multiple L1Ds and SPM Banks in a Cluster 66 11.4 L1 Data Cache / SPM Partitioning 70 11.5 Reconfiguration Overheads 71 Chapter 12 Experimental Results 75 12.1 Pipelined Applications 75 12.2 Simulation Environment 78 12.3 Memory Operations Latency Breakdown 79 Chapter 13 Conclusion 85 Bibliography 87 국문초록 95Docto

Microarchitectural Low-Power Design Techniques for Embedded Microprocessors

With the omnipresence of embedded processing in all forms of electronics today, there is a strong trend towards wireless, battery-powered, portable embedded systems which have to operate under stringent energy constraints. Consequently, low power consumption and high energy efficiency have emerged as the two key criteria for embedded microprocessor design. In this thesis we present a range of microarchitectural low-power design techniques which enable the increase of performance for embedded microprocessors and/or the reduction of energy consumption, e.g., through voltage scaling. In the context of cryptographic applications, we explore the effectiveness of instruction set extensions (ISEs) for a range of different cryptographic hash functions (SHA-3 candidates) on a 16-bit microcontroller architecture (PIC24). Specifically, we demonstrate the effectiveness of light-weight ISEs based on lookup table integration and microcoded instructions using finite state machines for operand and address generation. On-node processing in autonomous wireless sensor node devices requires deeply embedded cores with extremely low power consumption. To address this need, we present TamaRISC, a custom-designed ISA with a corresponding ultra-low-power microarchitecture implementation. The TamaRISC architecture is employed in conjunction with an ISE and standard cell memories to design a sub-threshold capable processor system targeted at compressed sensing applications. We furthermore employ TamaRISC in a hybrid SIMD/MIMD multi-core architecture targeted at moderate to high processing requirements (> 1 MOPS). A range of different microarchitectural techniques for efficient memory organization are presented. Specifically, we introduce a configurable data memory mapping technique for private and shared access, as well as instruction broadcast together with synchronized code execution based on checkpointing. We then study an inherent suboptimality due to the worst-case design principle in synchronous circuits, and introduce the concept of dynamic timing margins. We show that dynamic timing margins exist in microprocessor circuits, and that these margins are to a large extent state-dependent and that they are correlated to the sequences of instruction types which are executed within the processor pipeline. To perform this analysis we propose a circuit/processor characterization flow and tool called dynamic timing analysis. Moreover, this flow is employed in order to devise a high-level instruction set simulation environment for impact-evaluation of timing errors on application performance. The presented approach improves the state of the art significantly in terms of simulation accuracy through the use of statistical fault injection. The dynamic timing margins in microprocessors are then systematically exploited for throughput improvements or energy reductions via our proposed instruction-based dynamic clock adjustment (DCA) technique. To this end, we introduce a 6-stage 32-bit microprocessor with cycle-by-cycle DCA. Besides a comprehensive design flow and simulation environment for evaluation of the DCA approach, we additionally present a silicon prototype of a DCA-enabled OpenRISC microarchitecture fabricated in 28 nm FD-SOI CMOS. The test chip includes a suitable clock generation unit which allows for cycle-by-cycle DCA over a wide range with fine granularity at frequencies exceeding 1 GHz. Measurement results of speedups and power reductions are provided