Circuits Design For Low Power: Advance Digital Integrated Circuit Design
Circuits Design For Low Power: Advance Digital Integrated Circuit Design
Circuits Design For Low Power: Advance Digital Integrated Circuit Design
Hieu M. Nguyen
Review of scaling
Summary
cpu
pwr mem
i/o
- Distribution limits
- Substantial portion of wiring resource, area for power dist.
- Higher current => lower R, greater dI/dt => more wire, decap
- Package capable of low impedance distribution
Review of scaling
Summary
Dimensions L, W, aL,
Tox aW,
aTox
Review of scaling
Summary
Td = kCV/I
= kCV/(Vdd-Vt)a
Consistent with
C.F. Scaling
period (ns)
Fo4/cycle
60
20 cycle in FO4
50
15 Period
40
30 10
20
5
10
0 0
0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1 1.1
technology
dt
Ec C L
2 t 0 0
Vout dVout C V
L dd Vdd
Vout 0
2 Ec CL V
Vout 0
dVout CLVdd 2 / 2
out
1.5
Expected HP MP power
300
ITRS’01
250
Power (W)
200
Energy.Delay^2
Metric
10
Energy.Delay
Delay
Energy
1
0 2 4 6 8 10
Multiplier k
Digital Integrated Circuit Design©2017 PC.20
Functional Clock Gating
PowerPC 405LP measurements: 18:1 power range over 4:1 frequency range
Measured Power
400 400
Power (mW)
300 300
200 200
100 100
After Nowka,
0 0 et.al. ISSCC, Feb ‘02
1 1.2 1.4 1.6 1.8 2
Supply Voltage (V)
Freq
Scaling
Plus DVS
Ist
in out
P = ½ CswVdd DV f + IstVdd + IstaticVdd
Review of scaling
Summary
1000
100
1994 2005
0.001
1 0.1 0.01
Gate Length (microns)
Src: Nowak, et al
Reduction techniques:
– Lower the field (voltage or oxide thickness)
High-k material
Power (nW)
100
50
0
160 140 120 100 80 60 40 20
Technology
Capacitance minimization
Voltage-scaling
Power gating
Vdd/Vt selection
1.5
0.5
0
0.8 1 1.2 1.4 1.6 1.8 2
Logic Voltage(V)
Subthreshold dominated technology
After Nowka, et.al. ISSCC ‘02
B
B Standby
A headers/
Xb A footers
A B Xb
A B
X Xb X Xb
Low Hi
threshold/ threshold/
Thin oxide Thicker
oxide
Low Vt devices on critical paths, rest high Vt
70-180mV higher Vt, 10-100x lower leakage, 5-20% slower
Small fraction of devices low-Vt (1-5%)
Thick oxide reduces gate leakage by orders of magnitude
Xb
X Xb X
Stacked
devices
Design tradeoff:
– Performance => High supply, low threshold
– Active Power => Low supply, low threshold
– Standby => Low supply, high threshold
Static
– Stack effect – minimizing subthreshold thru
single fet paths
– Multiple thresholds: High Vt and Low Vt
transistors
– Multiple supplies: high and low Vdd
Design tradeoff:
– Performance => High supply, low threshold
– Active Power => Low supply, low threshold
– Standby => Low supply, high threshold
Static
– Stack effect – minimizing subthreshold thru single fet
paths
– Multiple thresholds: High Vt and Low Vt Transistors
– Multiple supplies: high and low Vdd
– Problem: optimum (Vdd,Vt) changes over time, across
dice
Dynamic (Vdd,Vt) selection
– DVS for supply voltage
– Dynamic threshold control thru:
Active well
Substrate biasing
SOI back gate, DTMOS, dual-gate technologies
3.3V
GP
GN
Vbp 1.8V
VDD 1.8V
Switch Switch
Cell 1.8V Cell
Logic
GND 0V
Vbn 0V
-1.5V
VDD+VB
Vbp VDD
uP Core
VDD VDD
Leakpfet
VB
Leaknfet
VSS 0V
GND 0V
Review of scaling
Summary
Power Metrics
– T. Sakurai and A. Newton, “Alpha-power law MOSFET model and its
applications to CMOS inverter delay and other formulas”, IEEE Journal
of Solid State Circuits, v. 25.2, pp. 584-594, Apr. 1990.
– R. Gonzalez, B. Gordon, M. Horowitz, “Supply and threshold voltage
scaling for low power CMOS” IEEE Journal of Solid State Circuits, v. 32,
no. 8, pp. 1210-1216, August 2000.
– Zyuban and Strenski, “Unified Methodology for Resolving Power-
Performance Tradeoffs at the Microarchitectural and Circuit
Levels”,ISPLED Aug.2002
– Brodersen, Horowitz, Markovic, Nikolic, Stojanovic “Methods for True
Power Minimization”, ICCAD Nov. 2002
– Stojanovic, Markovic, Nikolic, Horowitz, Brodersen, “Energy-Delay
Tradoffs in Combinational Logic using Gate Sizing and Supply Voltage
Optimization”, ESSCIRC, Sep. 2002
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Circuits Conference Digest of Technical Papers, pp. 14-18, 1994.
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Low Power Electronics Digest of Technical Papers, pp. 8-11, 1994.
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power high-speed CMOS digital design” IEEE Journal of Solid State Circuits, v. 33, no. 3, pp.
454-462, March 1998.
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