Tunable Error Detection-Correction for Efficient Adaptive Voltage Over-Scaling

This work introduces a Tunable Error Detection & Correction strategy (TED-C) aimed at improving the efficiency of adaptive voltage over-scaling (AVOS) in error-resilient applications. Through TED-C, the error coverage can be adjusted at run-time in order to accelerate the voltage scaling and achieve ultra-low energy consumption at the cost of quality-of-result (QoR). The mechanism is built upon elastic timing monitors, i.e., standard Razor-based timing monitors augmented with a tunable detection window and hardened with the aid of a dynamic short-path padding technique. Results collected over a FIR filter simulated with different realistic audio streams show TED-C achieves ultra-low energy-per-operation (up to 49.7% savings w.r.t. a standard Razor-driven AVOS) with negligible area overhead (2.4% vs. 27.5%) and low QoR degradation (0.72%).