Timing closure impacted by DVFS!! of digital electronics

While designing systems with DVFS techniques, we need to look at the impact of temperature inversion on the performance of the design. An important criteria while selecting voltages and frequencies for a design, one must consider a range such that delay/voltage consistently increases or decreases.

What does this means?
We must always operate above the temperature inversion point.

Especially in low power UDSM process, combined use of reduced VDD and High Threshold voltage may greatly modify the temperature sensitiveness of the design. Due to this, worst case timing is no longer guaranteed at higher temperatures. So in order to guarantee correct behavior of the design, one has to verify the design at various PVT corners. This leads to a significant increase in the total turn around time of the design.

In a nutshell, delay increases with increase in temperature, but below a certain voltage, this relationship inverts and delay starts to decrease with increase in temperature. This is a function of threshold voltage (Threshold voltage and carrier mobility are temperature dependent). Due to this threshold voltage dependency, we have observed that non-critical paths suddenly become critical.

Having said this, as soon as Voltage/Delay relate randomly Voltage Scaling becomes a nightmare to implement and verify.

Note: If both threshold voltage and carrier mobility monotonically decrease with increase in temperature, Operating Voltages(range) defines the performance of the design.