IMPROVED THERMAL MANAGEMENT WITH RELIABILITY BANKING.

The article presents the authors' views on temperature-dependent reliability models to derive the expected life time of the electronic circuits. At times the system designers use a worst-case temperature to evaluate system reliability that leads to excessive design margins. An increase in temperature in general means that the chip is consuming its lifetime more rapidly and vice versa. Also the system might engage dynamic thermal management (DTM) techniques unnecessarily. The article reflects that the effect of low-temperature can compensate for that of high temperature on reliability. Recent research on material and device reliability has shown that temperature and voltage-dependent dynamic processes also govern other failure mechanisms, such as negative-bias temperature instability and gate oxide break down. A chip's thermal characteristics include not only cross-chip spatial temperature gradients but also temporal temperature gradients for each component. Lifetime banking provides benefits to the chip by avoiding unnecessary DTM engagements while meeting expected lifetime requirements. INSETS: Dynamic thermal management.;Dynamic electromigration reliability model.;Thermal behaviors in server workloads..