Content-Aware Low-Power Configurable Aging Mitigation for SRAM Memories

Aging through Negative Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI) significantly jeopardizes reliability of SRAM-based memories. We propose a content-aware microarchitectural-level technique for mitigating aging of these SRAM-based memories, by altering the input and output data. The goal is to achieve cost-effective lifetime improvement through low-power aging balancing of all memory cells. For a configurable design, we perform power, area, and aging analysis of different aging balancing circuits. This analysis is leveraged to design a novel aging resilient memory architecture. To curtail the power overhead while still achieving a balanced aging, our architecture employs an anti-aging controller that leverages the data characteristics to take spatio-temporal aging balancing decisions. It dynamically selects: (1) which aging balancing circuit to activate, (2) at what time instant the circuit should be activated, and (3) on which SRAM cells aging balancing should be applied. This is achieved by identifying different configuration parameters, which can be adjusted at run time to balance the aging of SRAM memories. Our experiments demonstrate significant aging improvements at a low power overhead. In addition, we perform sensitivity analysis of different parameters of our architecture to demonstrate power vs. reliability tradeoffs under different run-time scenarios.