An optimal operating point by using error monitoring circuits with an error-resilient technique

Abstract

For applications related to human, such as Internet of Things (IoT) and wearable devices, near threshold voltage (NTV) technology has been proposed for the trade-off between performance and energy consumption. However, error-resilient techniques are required in the circuits to improve reliability of the NTV operation. In this paper, we propose a low-overhead error-resilient system and a design flow for NTV operations. We use a new monitoring circuit, which can detect timing errors and find an optimal operation point of the system. Also, we propose two different methodologies, which are slack-based methodology and sensitivity-based methodology. From the proposed monitoring system and the sensitivitybased sorting algorithm, benchmark results show that the optimal designs provide up to 46% monitoring area reduction maintaining similar error detection ability of the conventional error-resilient design.