IEICE Transactions on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences
Online ISSN : 1745-1337
Print ISSN : 0916-8508
Regular Section
Adopting the Drowsy Technique for Instruction Caches: A Soft Error Perspective
Soong Hyun SHINSung Woo CHUNGEui-Young CHUNGChu Shik JHON
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2008 Volume E91.A Issue 7 Pages 1772-1779

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Abstract

As technology scales down, leakage energy accounts for a greater proportion of total energy. Applying the drowsy technique to a cache, is regarded as one of the most efficient techniques for reducing leakage energy. However, it increases the Soft Error Rate (SER), thus, many researchers doubt the reliability of the drowsy technique. In this paper, we show several reasons why the instruction cache can adopt the drowsy technique without reliability problems. First, an instruction cache always stores read-only data, leading to soft error recovery by re-fetching the instructions from lower level memory. Second, the effect of the re-fetching caused by soft errors on performance is negligible. Additionally, a considerable percentage of soft errors can occur without harming the performance. Lastly, unrecoverable soft errors can be controlled by the scrubbing method. The simulation results show that the drowsy instruction cache rarely increases the rate of unrecoverable errors and negligibly degrades the performance.

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© 2008 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers
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