This report introduces RAMP, an architectural model for long-term processor reliability measurement. With aggressive transistor scaling and increasing processor power and temperature, reliability due to wear-out mechanisms is expected to become a significant issue in microprocessor design. Reliability awareness at the microarchitectural design stage will soon be a necessity and RAMP provides a convenient abstraction to do so.
RAMP models chip wide mean time to failure as a function of the failure rates of individual structures on chip due to different failure mechanisms, and can be used to evaluate the reliability implications of different applications, architectural features, and processor designs.
RAMP is a self-standing module which can be attached to architectural simulators which generate power and temperature measurements, and has currently been ported to IBM’s Turandot processor simulator and the RSIM architectural simulator.
By: Jayanth Srinivasan, Sarita V. Adve, Pardip Bose, Jude Rivers, Chao-Kun Hu
Published in: RC23048 in 2003
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