Results and Conclusion

A transistor, at its essence, is just a switch with an on state and an off state. The switching

frequency is how fast that value is changed from an off state to an on state or vice versa. A 1GHz

processor's transistors are making 1 billion binary transitions per cycle, which corresponds to actual

calculations. This switch from on state to off state is not perfect. In figure 3A you can see the ideal

binary solution, where a transistor is either in an on or an off state.

Figure 3A

Vcc

Voltage

Vss
Time

As you can see the ideal binary solution is nothing but a repeated on off. Vcc is the high

voltage, which represents the on state of the transistor. Vss is the off state of the transistor. If there is

any value that falls below Vcc it will be considered an off rather than an on state.

However, the ideal binary solution is almost never seen in a real world setting. It takes time to

drain and increase voltage. What is actually occurring is very different. The actual binary solution can

be seen in Figure 3B.

Figure 3B:

Vcc

Vss
As you can see with the actual solution, the voltage takes some time to reach Vcc(on) or return

to a state of no voltage, or Vss(off). This poses a few problems. The most prominent is the transistor

not reaching Vcc before returning to Vss. As I explained before, a transistor at anything below Vcc is

detected as Vss, or an off state. In figure 3C you can see how this might happen.

Figure 3C:

Vcc

Vss

Here you are trying to force the transistors to go faster than they are capable of raising or

draining the voltage. The result is incomplete voltage draining and/or not reaching Vcc. If you only

raise the frequency a minimal amount over what is stable you may not reach an error condition right

away. That is to say, you may have a binary solution where it will not reach Vcc but that transistor isn’t
performing a critical system function. Therefore you will not have a system error (“BSOD”) until one

of the transistors making errors is given a critical task to perform.

So at the point where I have a transistor not reaching Vcc I logically have two options. The first

would be to eliminate the gap between the actual voltage and Vcc, so the transistor would now be

hitting Vcc where it wasn’t before. This is done by raising voltages. The second option, the one I was

more interested in for the goals of this project, is to lessen the time it takes to completely drain and

reach complete Vcc againfi. I had to figure out a way to raise and drain the voltage faster.

The rate at which the transistor changes state (on to off) is manipulated by voltage dissipation.

This can be influenced by the current. Generally, the higher the current the faster the voltage

dissipation. The formula for current is I=V/R (current=voltage/resistance). We can do two things to

change the current. First, we can raise voltage. Again, the one I am more interested in is my second

option- dropping the resistance. Dropping the resistance can be done relatively easily. George Ohm

discovered that by dropping the temperature we can also decrease the resistance.

In my results, I found that there was an average of about an 8% increase in maximum

sustainable frequency per 30c decrease in temperature. This was close to my hypothesis of 10%

increase for every 30c decrease in temperature. The slope for the line of best fit for the different

voltages is very close. It is important to mention that there are other effects of running at these extreme

temperatures and voltages that don't necessarily occur at normal conditions. There are also effects that

hurt the processor's internals over time when these higher temperatures and voltages are used in

conjunction with each other. Issues such as electron migration or micro heating could have caused

small discrepancies as I continued my experimentation. However, it is impossible for us to know

exactly why there is small differences in the average frequency increases using different voltages.

During everyday use the point where we would see the best frequency while sustaining a somewhat

small rate of degradation (and therefore lifespan) due to electron migration and the mechanical stress of
thermal throttling (where the processor is stressed due to the heating and cooling) is at 1.4v (which is

still well within the limits of AMD's specification for voltage on SOI insulation techniques) and 30c. If

lifespan was of primary concern to you, you should run your processor at 1.2v and 30c. At this

temperature and voltage your processor should exceed AMD estimate of MTBF (mean time before

failure). If you needed a processor to run at its maximum speed regardless of its lifespan and the cost of

cooling, the best conditions to operate it at would be -90c and 1.7v.

My results also show something that is somewhat interesting. In figure 4b we can see at 1.7v

and 60c the system would not boot successfully. This perplexed me until I discovered a somewhat

basic explanation for this. Failure due to quantum tunneling occurs when a current actually goes

through or jumps over an insulating layer in an interconnect between processor components (e.g. cache

and core). Quantum tunneling will cause errors because the results returned from an interconnect could

be wrong. This is a result of a high kinetic energy of the electrons. The heat just adds to this. The more

heat there is in the system the more kinetic energy the electrons posses. This just adds to the huge force

behind the electrons that the voltage gives. However, you would think that the resistance of the

insulating layer (specifically a silicon over insulator) would drop as temperature dropped. However this

is not the case. In these silicon insulating layers the resistance goes up as the temperature goes down.

Another explanation I had for these results at high temperatures and high voltages (1.7v at 60c)

is the effect of sub-threshold leakage. Figure 4A depicts this for us. I2 shows sub threshold leakage.

Sub-threshold leakage occurs when the transistor is meant to be off, but a small amount of voltage still

leaks through. This is far below the point that is represented as on or Vcc. It is almost impossible to tell

how much voltage is leaking, but it is possible that at some points you would have enough to reach

Vcc. The perfect conditions for this to occur would be at a high temperature and a high voltage. Of

course there is other leakage from the processor. These other types are outlined in figure 4a, but are not

meant to be explored in this paper. However it is worth mentioning that another type of leakage, known

as gate oxide tunneling, occurs when voltage is leaked from the gate. This voltage is represented as
head and is one of the key reasons why we need to cool our processors in the first place. The amount of

power the processor leaks is quadratic as the manufacturing process decreases the size of the chips.

This is why there are large developments in the insulating layer of the gate. Such as the High-K

dielectric layer that Intel uses.

Figure 4A: