Intel Designs Chips That Correct Their Own Errors

From a simple look at the industry today, one can easily discern that processor makers are steadily reducing the size of transistors, in the effort of creating chips that are faster, more efficient and less prone to errors. However, the problem is that, as transistors get smaller, electrons are leaked in higher numbers, which means that power is wasted. Normally, this problem could be alleviated by running the chips at lower voltages, but this sometimes leads to serious errors that may force users to restart processes that go awry. In order to make up for this, Intel is reportedly researching a type of processor that can automatically correct such errors.

According to Intel's Director of Circuits and Systems Research, Wen-Hann Wang, most of today's microprocessors operate in conditions that are far from ideal, namely at high voltages, because this approach solves the error problem. However, the same approach will never suit mobile devices, because power efficiency is very important in their case. Intel's idea is of a chip that operates at a low voltage and, in case an error-detection circuit detects a problem, it redoes the calculation at a higher voltage in order to correct it.

"You don't know how things will vary, and in which circuits errors will happen," Wang says. "But if you don't worry about it, it will be okay most of the time. […] When you have to correct an error, and reexecute a process more slowly, there is a tiny penalty. But overall, you get a huge return."

"They push it as close to the danger zone as they can, and things sometimes go bad, and they correct for it, which is very clever," Krishna Palem, professor of computing at Rice University in Houston, states. "The number of times you do that ought to be few and far between."

The technology currently goes by the name of resilient circuits and, according to the researchers, the processors using such a technology can either employ 37% less power or work 21% faster on any given power level, as shown by lab tests. Unfortunately, this approach will not be implemented very soon, but should become necessary by the time circuitry reaches the 20nm process technology.