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Emerging 4G wireless communication systems need to deliver much higher data rates, more flexibility, and a significantly higher energy efficiency than current systems. To cope with this immense increase of requirements, new design approaches are a necessity. This paper focuses on the design of an advanced multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) detector, which is typically a bottleneck in the wireless receiver. In the proposed template-based design approach innovative architecture concepts, such as very wide register and distributed loop buffer, and algorithm-architecture co-optimizations are combined. The resulting MIMO detector processor, which is scalable to eight and more antennas, achieves a high area efficiency of 571 GOPS/ \mathrmmm^2 and a high energy efficiency of 3.3 GOPS/mW in the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) 40-nm technology. By exploiting the dynamically varying requirements, the proposal has the potential to achieve a higher average energy efficiency than an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) equivalent. However, a penalty in total area consumption exists. The proposed architecture style offers an interesting and a very promising tradeoff in between the traditional ASIC and the other programmable processor solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For the first time, we present complete device threshold voltage (VT)-targeting methodology for FinFET SRAM in 10-nm technology, considering capacitance due to metal pattering and device variability to set target read current for different variants of SRAM architecture to determine technology high-density (HD) SRAM cell. The VT-targeting methodology brings into play the worst case read and write margins available for SRAM cell to determine nominal device VT by tuning the work function of metal gate. Analysis shows that for minimum leakage current, 112 SRAM cell is optimum, whereas for the same area of 0.0546~\mu \mathrm{m}^{\mathrm {2}} with 50% higher leakage, 122 SRAM outperform by 5% and 20% improved read and write margins, respectively. The 122 SRAM as HD cell reduces the cost of the technology by sharing P-channel field effect transistor (PFET) and N-channel field effect transistor (NFET) VT mask with the high threshold voltage logic devices, whereas the 112 SRAM device shares only NFET VT mask. The 111 SRAM can achieve target performance at lesser area of 0.048~\mu \mathrmm^\mathrm 2 by compromising read stability, which will result in lower yield. At 64-nm pitch, litho-etch litho-etch (LELE) double-patterned gate impacts device performance and alleviates variability; hence the read margin of SRAM cell should consider an additional 1\sigma \mathrm {\mathbf {rsnm}} margin to retain the same yield in 10-nm-technology era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

3D integration is being explored as a viable alternative to overcome limitations faced by mobile MPSoC platforms in traditional 2D designs. TSV based interdie connection is the most widely used approach currently. Although, TSV dimensions are scaling down, they still impose a restriction on the interdie connections density and the granularity at which 3D partitioning can be carried out. These limitations will aggravate in future scaled technologies. Alternatives such as Cu-Cu bonding need to be explored to achieve very fine-pitch and high density interdie connections. In this letter, we carry out a system architecture level comparison for a complex MPSoC platform instantiated for wireless PHY processing (WLAN and LTE). We compare 2D and 3D using: 1) TSVs with \mu bump and RDL (F2B); and 2) Cu-Cu bonding (F2F). We show significant gains in 3D as compared to 2D. We also show that F2B and F2F have different system level architecture requirements, and that their impact on parameters at interconnect and system architecture level varies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Reduced energy consumption is one of the most important design goals for embedded application domains like wireless communication, multimedia, and biomedical applications. The instruction memory hierarchy has been proven to be one of the most power hungry parts of the system. This paper introduces an architectural enhancement for the instruction memory to reduce energy consumption and improve performance. The proposed distributed instruction memory organization requires minimal hardware overhead and supports the execution of multiple incompatible loops in parallel in a uniprocessor system. We present different methods to implement the loop controller architecture, compare them, and show that distributing the instruction memory helps to reduce the interconnect cost as well. This architecture enhancement can reduce the energy consumed in the instruction memory hierarchy by 59 percent and improve the performance by 22 percent compared to hardware-based enhanced-SMT-based architectures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New applications demand very high processing power when run on embedded systems. Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) architectures have emerged as a promising alternative to provide such processing capabilities under the given energy budget. However, in this new VLIW-based architectures, the register file is a very critical contributor to the overall power consumption and new approaches have to be proposed to reduce its power while preserving system performance. In this paper, we propose a novel joint hardware–software approach that reduces the leakage energy in the register files of these embedded VLIW architectures. This approach relies upon an energy-aware register assignment method and a hardware support that creates sub-banks in the global register file that can be switched on/off at run time. Our results indicate energy savings in the register file, after considering the overhead of the added extra hardware, up to 50% for modern multimedia embedded applications without performance degradation. We illustrate this approach using real-life applications running on these processors. We also illustrate the tradeoff between the area overhead vs. the gains in the leakage energy for the different strategies. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Negative Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI) is one of the major time-dependent degradation mechanisms that impact the reliability of advanced deeply scaled CMOS technologies. NBTI can cause workload-dependent shifts on a transistor’s threshold voltage ( V TH ), and performance during its lifetime. This study presents a comparison of the NBTI aging on adder architectures and ring oscillators in the downscaling technology nodes. The first part of the study focuses on the NBTI-induced performance degradation of 32-bit adders (one of the most fundamental block of a processor’s arithmetic logic unit) from the points of architectural topology and workload dependency in the planar technologies (i.e. commercial 28 , 45 , 65 nm nodes), while the second part investigates the energy-delay product degradation of ring oscillators beyond the planar nodes (i.e. research-grade 14 , 10 , 7 nm FinFET technology nodes for several FET channel materials, e.g. Si, SiGe, Ge, InGaAs). Results show the tight coupling between the NBTI aging and the architectural topology, run-time workload, and technology choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]