Exploring aging deceleration in FinFET-based multi-core systems

Abstract

Power and thermal issues are the main constraints for high-performance multi-core systems. As the current technology of choice, FinFET is observed to have lower delay under higher temperature in super-threshold voltage region, an effect called temperature effect inversion (TEI). While it has been shown that system performance can be improved under power constraints, as technology aggressively scales down to sub-20nm nodes, thermal issues also emerge as important reliability concerns throughout the system lifetime. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to provide a comprehensive evaluation of both TEI and aging effects on the performance and power of FinFET-based multi-core systems with multiple voltage/frequency levels. Our experimental results show that aging effects can be reduced by up to 53.59% by exploiting the TEI effect. Based on a combined multivariate objective for power and aging, this work proposes an aging-aware algorithm, dubbed AgingMin, to select the optimal TEI-aware voltage/frequency operation points for decelerating the aging effect. Experimental results show that AgingMin improves the classic 10-year system lifetime by an average of 1.61 years while introducing less than 1% power overhead when compared to existing state-of-the-art techniques.