Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling for Long-Term and Fail-Safe Operation

This paper presents a dynamic voltage and frequency scaling methodology for long-term operation, using fault-tolerance to prevent failures. The DVFS methodology allows a dual-mode operation, targeting high performance or low-power operation modes, and using an on-line circuit monitoring with aging-aware fault-tolerance to prevent errors during a long-term operation. Fail-safe operation is achieved by using a cooperative work of global and local predictive fault detection sensors, sensitive to PVT and Aging (namely, Bias Temperature Instability effects), and using an additional fault-tolerance margin to improve error avoidance. High-level (Verilog) and Spice simulations for a 65nm CMOS technology demonstrate the results for the dynamic voltage and frequency scaling strategy, showing the fast switching between different operation modes (high performance or lowpower) and without errors. Keywords—component; formatting; style; styling; insert (key