Exploiting Adaptive Techniques to Improve Processor Energy Efficiency

As technology advances, the size of transistor — the basic building block of microprocessors, continues shrinking. The downscaled transistor will make its manufacture process become less controllable, and its operation less predictable. Moreover, smaller transistor size will lead to higher volume of transistors on a single chip, thus increases the chip power consumption. This dissertation proposes various techniques to efficiently tolerate the uncertainties in microprocessors. Also, it proposes an innovative design paradigm to build energy-efficient processor under ultra-low supply-voltage. Evaluated with rigorous methodology, the proposed approaches achieve significant improvement in processor energy efficiency, compared to other state-of-art techniques