System-level process variation driven throughput analysis for single and multiple voltage-frequency island designs

Manufacturing process variations are the primary cause of timing yield loss in aggressively scaled technologies. In this paper, we analyze the impact of process variations on the throughput (rate) characteristics of embedded systems comprised of multiple voltage-frequency islands (VFIs) represented as component graphs. We provide an efficient, yet accurate method to compute the throughput of an application in a probabilistic scenario and show that systems implemented with multiple VFIs are more likely to meet throughput constraints than their fully synchronous counterparts. The proposed framework allows designers to investigate the impact of architectural decisions such as the granularity of VFI partitioning on their designs, while determining the likelihood of a system meeting specified throughput constraints. An implementation of the proposed framework is accurate within 1.2% of Monte Carlo simulation while yielding speedups ranging from 78X-260X, for a set of synthetic benchmarks. Results on a real benchmark (MPEG-2 encoder) show that a nine clock domain implementation gives 100% yield for a throughput constraint for which a fully synchronous design only yields 25%. For the same throughput constraint, a three clock domain architecture yields 78%.