A Novel Cache-Utilization-Based Dynamic Voltage-Frequency Scaling Mechanism for Reliability Enhancements

作者:Chen Yen Hao*; Tang Yi Lun; Liu Yi Yu; Wu Allen C H; Hwang TingTing
来源:IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration Systems, 2017, 25(3): 820-832.
DOI:10.1109/TVLSI.2016.2614993

摘要

We propose a cache architecture using a 7T/14T SRAM (Fujiwara et al., 2009) and a control mechanism for reliability enhancements. Our control mechanism differs from conventional dynamic voltage-frequency scaling (DVFS) methods in that it considers not only the cycles per instruction behaviors but also the cache utilization. To measure cache utilization, a novel metric is proposed. The experimental results show that our proposed method achieves 1000 times less bit-error occurrences compared with conventional DVFS methods under the ultralow-voltage operation. Moreover, the results indicate that our proposed method surprisingly not only incurs no performance and energy overheads but also achieves on average a 2.10% performance improvement and a 6.66% energy reduction compared with conventional DVFS methods.