15th Int'l Symposium on Quality Electronic Design

This paper presents a resilient cache memory for dynamic variation tolerance in a 40-nm CMOS. The cache can perform sustained operations under a large-amplitude voltage droop. To realize sustained operation, the resilient cache exploit 7T/14T bit-enhancing SRAM and on-chip voltage/temperature monitoring circuit. 7T/14T bitenhancing SRAM can reconfigure itself dynamically to a reliable bit-enhancing mode. An on-chip monitoring circuit can sense a precise supply voltage level of a power rail of the cache. The proposed cache can dynamically change its operation mode using the voltage/temperature monitoring result and can operate reliably under a large-amplitude voltage droop. Experimental result shows that it does not fail with 25% and 30% droop of Vdd and it provides 91 times better failure rate with a 35% droop of Vdd compared with the conventional design. The processor simulator shows that the proposed cache running in the bit-enhancing mode results in 2.88% IPC loss on average.