An On-line Reliability Emulation Framework

Technology scaling made reliability a primary concernfor integrated circuits. Increased power and temperatureexasperate the impact of degradation phenomena and shortenprocessors lifetime. This issue is particularly dramatic for mobileprocessors, characterized by variable workload and environmentalconditions. Due to the different time scales at whichreliability phenomena and computation happens, state-of-theartDRM solutions are evaluated using high-level workload andsystem models. To enable the design of workload-aware DRMwith accurate reliability models, in this work we propose asoftware framework for virtualizing the processors reliability.Our framework captures the effect of variable workload andenvironmental conditions and allows to emulate longer degradationin a short time scale. We implement the framework on a realAndroid device and exploit it to enable workload-aware DynamicReliability Management (DRM).