Computation as estimation: Estimation-theoretic IC design improves robustness and reduces power consumption

Modern integrated circuits (ICs) are designed as massively parallel systems as a consequence of diminishing silicon feature sizes. This has adversely impacted reliability because of increased errors due to process and environmental variations, and particle hits. Viewing hardware errors as analogous to measurement or system noise allows us to borrow results from estimation theory and extend Moore's law. The estimation-theoretic framework provides a design optimization formalization that enables power/reliability trade-off in broad classes of applications. Two applications described here show that specific instantiations of the framework yield significant power savings and system reliability.