Performance Optimization and Analysis of Blade Designs under Delay Variability

Abstract

As manufacturing processes continue to shrink and supply voltages drop, timing margins due to increased process, temperature, and voltage variability become a significant portion of the clock period. An asynchronous bundled data resilient template called Blade has recently been proposed to curb these margins and thereby outperform synchronous alternatives. This paper proposes a model to analyze the performance of Blade designs and an approach to optimize it. We validate the model against gate-level simulations of a resilient 3-stage MIPS CPU implemented with Blade and use it to compare the optimal performance of Blade designs with synchronous alternatives. The results show that Blade offers up to 44% higher performance than traditional designs and 23% higher performance than Bubble Razor, the synchronous resiliency strategy with the highest reported performance.