High performance digital circuits require long bus lines to operate at very high frequencies, necessitating a large number of repeaters to be inserted along these lines. Power consumed by repeaters, particularly that contributed by subthreshold leakage, is becoming a major consideration in digital design. We compare several threshold voltage assignment schemes to reduce runtime leakage power in buffers. We explore trade-offs between dynamic and static power by selectively mixing high and low Vt devices within a pull-up or pull-down network. We propose an activity-dependent hybrid Vt assignment scheme that can be applied across a bus. These configurations are shown to reduce total power by up to 38% and runtime leakage by up to 48%, with negligible design or area overhead.
Citation:
Saumil Shah, Kanak Agarwal, Dennis Sylvester, "A New Threshold Voltage Assignment Scheme for Runtime Leakage Reduction in On-Chip Repeaters," iccd, pp.138-143, 2004 IEEE International Conference on Computer Design (ICCD'04), 2004