CNFET-based high throughput register file architecture

Abstract

A Carbon Nanotube field-effect transistor (CNFET) is a promising alternative to a traditional metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) to overcome the “Power Wall” challenge. However, CNFETs are inherently subject to much larger process variation and thereby they can incur a significant design cost to build high-performance processors. Particularly, the large register files (RF) of SIMD GPU-style processors suffer more from such process variations because the number of critical paths are multiplied by the SIMD width and thread count. In this paper, we first show that RF organizations coupled with architectural techniques are critical to RF performance under CNFET-specific variations. Second, we propose several architectural techniques to mitigate the performance degradation, leveraging distinctive characteristics of CNFETs and unique features of SIMD processors. Our experiments demonstrate that the average RF performance is 53% higher than the worst design under variation and only 7% lower than the design with no variation.