Date of Award:

5-2012

Document Type:

Thesis

Degree Name:

Master of Science (MS)

Department:

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Committee Chair(s)

Koushik Chakraborty

Committee

Koushik Chakraborty

Committee

Sanghamitra Roy

Committee

Edmund Spencer

Abstract

Negative Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI) is becoming a major reliability problem in the semiconductor industry. As time passes, NBTI reduces the capacity of performing correct computations in the microprocessor. Hence, after certain time period, the microprocessor may fail to work as we expect, causing failure of the entire system it is part of. In this research, we study the root cause of the failure due to NBTI effect. Based on our findings, we propose multiple methods to reduce the negative impact of NBTI on a microprocessor. We build a comprehensive experimental setup to consider real world effects in a microprocessor. We evaluate our methods against the previous work and find that our methods substantially improve the processor reliability. This research could be useful in the future to extend lifetime of the processor.

Checksum

9576e30acf3b016cd8f4adbdd57926b5

Comments

This work made publicly available electronically on April 10, 2012.

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