Temperature-aware Dynamic Voltage Scaling for Near-Threshold Computing

Power/energy reduction is of uttermost importance for applications with stringent power/energy budget such as ultra-low power and energy-harvested systems. Aggressive voltage scaling and in particular Near-Threshold Computing (NTC) is a promising approach to reduce the power and energy consumption. However, reducing the supply voltage leads to drastic performance variation induced by process and run-time variation. Temperature variation is one of the major sources of performance variation. In this paper, we study the impact of temperature variation on the circuit behavior at near threshold region and show that the ambient temperature has a huge impact on the metrics such as circuit delay, power and energy consumption. We also propose a low-cost, ambient temperature-aware voltage scaling technique to reduce the unnecessary energy overhead caused by temperature variation. Simulation results show that our proposed approach reduces the energy consumption by more than 3X.