Bo Liu
Jos Huisken
ABSTRACT
Process variability severely impacts the performance of circuits operating in the subthreshold domain. Among other reasons, this mainly stems from the fact that subthreshold current follows a widely spread Log-Normal distribution. In this paper we introduce a new transistor sizing methodology for standard cells. Our premise relies on balancing the N and P network currents based on statistical formulations. Our approach renders more robust cells. We observe up to 57% better performance and 69% lower energy consumption on a set of ISCAS circuits when they are synthesized with our library as opposed to a commercial library in a CMOS 90nm technology.
- Calhoun, B. H., Wang, A., Chandrakasan, A. 2005, "Modeling and sizing for minimum energy operation in subthreshold circuits", IEEE J. of Solid-State Circuits, pp. 1778--1786, 2005.Google Scholar
- Keane, J., Hanyong Eom, Tae-Hyoung Kim, Sapatnekar, S., Kim, C. 2006, "Subthreshold logical effort: a systematic framework for optimal subthreshold device sizing", 43rd ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference, pp. 425--428, 2006. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Tae-Hyoung Kim, Hanyong Eom, Keane, J., Kim, C. 2006, "Utilizing reverse short channel effect for optimal subthreshold circuit design.", Int. Symp. Low Power Electronics and Design, pp. 127--130, 2006. Google ScholarDigital Library
- E. L. Crow and K. Shimizu, 1988, "Lognormal distributions: Theory and applications", CRC, 1988.Google Scholar
- B. Zhai, S. Hanson, D. Blaauw, and D. Sylvester, 2005, "Analysis and mitigation of variability in subthreshold design", Int. Symp. Low Power Electronics and Design, pp. 20--25, 2005. Google ScholarDigital Library
- M. Pelgrom, A. Duinmaijer, A. Welbers, and A. P. G. Welbers, 1989, "Matching properties of MOS transistors", IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits, vol. 24, pp. 1433--1440, 1989.Google ScholarCross Ref
- J. Kwong and A. P. Chandrakasan, 2006, "Variation-driven device sizing for minimum energy subthreshold circuits", Int. Symp. Low Power Electronics and Design. pp. 8--13, 2006. Google ScholarDigital Library
- H. Al-Hertani, D. Al-Khalili, and C. Rozon, 2007, "A new subthreshold leakage model for NMOS transistor stacks", IEEE Northeast Workshop on Circuits and Systems, Montreal, QC, Canada, pp. 972--975, 2007.Google Scholar
- L. Fenton, 1960, "The sum of log-normal probability distributions in scatter Transmission Systems", IRE Transactions on Communications Systems, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 57--67, 1960.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Y. Pu, J. Pineda de Gyvez, H. Corporaal, and Y. Ha, 2010, "An ultra low energy multi-standard JPEG co-processor in 65nm CMOS with sub/near threshold supply voltage", IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits, vol. 45, no. 3, pp. 668--680, 2010.Google ScholarCross Ref
- N. Lotze, J. Goppert, and Y. Manoli, 2010, "Timing modeling for digital sub- threshold circuits," in Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference, pp. 299--302, 2010. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Standard cell sizing for subthreshold operation
Recommendations
Utilizing reverse short-channel effect for optimal subthreshold circuit design
The impact of the reverse short-channel effect (RSCE) on device current is stronger in the subthreshold region due to reduced drain-induced barrier lowering (DIBL) and the exponential dependency of current on threshold voltage. This paper describes a ...
Crosstalk noise optimization by post-layout transistor sizing
ISPD '02: Proceedings of the 2002 international symposium on Physical designThis paper proposes a post-layout transistor sizing method for crosstalk noise reduction. The proposed method downsizes the drivers of the aggressor wires for noise reduction, utilizing the precise interconnect information extracted from the detail-...
Performance enhancement of subthreshold circuits using substrate biasing and charge-boosting buffers
GLSVLSI '10: Proceedings of the 20th symposium on Great lakes symposium on VLSISubthreshold circuits are ideal for ultra low power applications. However, they suffer from low operating speeds. By improving the speed of subthreshold circuits their application spectrum can be expanded. In this paper, two existing biasing methods and ...
Comments