Soft error-aware leakage reduction through body bias

Abstract

For modern processors, two reliability issues, namely increased leakage power and soft error rate, continue to intensify as device technologies scale down to nanometers. While many researchers have proposed methods to efficiently control leakage power by tuning body bias, few recent works have considered the quantitative negative impact of this technique on circuit soft error vulnerability. In this paper, we introduce a novel body bias based approach for reliability improvement that correlates leakage reduction and soft error immunity degradation. The experimental results show that the proposed technique provides satisfactory leakage reduction with confined soft error degradation in 32 nm high-k/metal gate benchmark circuits.