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Summary: c 2007 by Pradeep Ramachandran. All rights reserved.
LIMITATIONS OF THE MTTF METRIC FOR
ARCHITECTURE-LEVEL LIFETIME RELIABILITY ANALYSIS
BY
PRADEEP RAMACHANDRAN
B.Tech., Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, 2005
THESIS
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of Master of Science in Computer Science
in the Graduate College of the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007
Urbana, Illinois
To amma, appa, Praveen and ammamma,
who support me from across the globe
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ABSTRACT
This work concerns metrics for evaluating microarchitectural enhancements to improve processor lifetime
reliability. The commonly used metric is mean time to failure (MTTF). However, MTTF does not provide
information on the reliability characteristics during the relatively short operational life of a processor. We
study nTTF, the time to failure of n% of the population. nTTF describes the failure process more accurately
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