Aging effects of leakage optimizations for caches

Besides static power consumption, sub-90nm devices have to account for NBTI effects, which are one of the major concerns about system reliability. Some of the factors that regulate power consumption also impact NBTI-induced aging effects; however, to which extent traditional low-power techniques can mitigate NBTI issues has not been investigated thoroughly. This is especially true for cache memories, which are the target of this work. We show how leakage optimization techniques can also be leveraged to extend the lifetime a cache. Experimental analysis points out that, while achieving a total energy reduction up to 80\%, managing static power can also provide a 5x factor on lifetime extension.

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