Comparison of in-situ delay monitors for use in Adaptive Voltage Scaling

[摘要] In Adaptive Voltage Scaling (AVS) the supply voltage of digital circuits istuned according to the circuit's actual operating condition, which enablesdynamic compensation to PVTA variations. By exploiting the excessive safetymargins added in state-of-the-art worst-case designs considerable powersaving is achieved. In our approach, the operating condition of the circuitis monitored by in-situ delay monitors. This paper presents different designsto implement the in-situ delay monitors capable of detecting late but stillnon-erroneous transitions, called Pre-Errors. The developed Pre-Errormonitors are integrated in a 16 bit multiplier test circuit and theresulting Pre-Error AVS system is modeled by a Markov chain in order todetermine the power saving potential of each Pre-Error detection approach.

[学科分类] 电子、光学、磁材料