J. Low Power Electron. Appl., Volume 5, Issue 2 (June 2015) – 7 articles , Pages 38-150

The pursuit of continuous scaling of electronic devices in the semiconductor industry has led to two unintended but significant outcomes: a rapid increase in susceptibility to radiation induced errors, and an overall rise in power consumption. Operating under low voltage to reduce power only aggravates radiation related reliability issues. The proposed “SEU Hardening Incorporating Extreme Low Power Bitcell Design” (SHIELD) addresses these two major concerns simultaneously. It is based on the concept of gating the conventional cross-coupled inverters while introducing a novel “cut-off” network. This creates redundant storage nodes and eliminates the internal feedback loop during radiation particle impact. The SHIELD bitcell tolerates upsets with charge deposits over 1 pC. Simulations confirm its advantages in terms of leakage power, with more than twofold lower leakage currents than previous solutions when operated at a 700mV supply voltage in a 65 nm process. To validate the bitcell’s robustness, several test cases and special concerns, including multiple node upsets (MNU) and half-select, are examined. Full article

In this study, we demonstrate near-0.1 V minimum operating voltage of a low-variability Silicon on Thin Buried Oxide (SOTB) process for one million logic gates on silicon. Low process variability is required to obtain higher energy efficiency during ultra-low-voltage operation with steeper subthreshold slope transistors. In this study, we verify the decrease in operating voltage of logic circuits via a variability-suppressed SOTB process. In our measurement results with test chips fabricated in 65-nm SOTB and bulk processes, the operating voltage at which the first failure is observed was lowered from 0.2 to 0.125 V by introducing a low-variability SOTB process. Even at 0.115 V, over 40% yield can be expected as per our measurement results on SOTB test chips. Full article

In this paper, we analyze the variability of III-V homojunction tunnel FET (TFET) and FinFET devices and 32-bit carry-lookahead adder (CLA) circuit operating in near-threshold region. The impacts of the most severe intrinsic device variations including work function variation (WFV) and fin line-edge roughness (fin LER) on TFET and FinFET device I_on, I_off, C_g, 32-bit CLA delay and power-delay product (PDP) are investigated and compared using 3D atomistic TCAD mixed-mode Monte-Carlo simulations and HSPICE simulations with look-up table based Verilog-A models calibrated with TCAD simulation results. The results indicate that WFV and fin LER have different impacts on device I_on and I_off. Besides, at low operating voltage (<0.3 V), the CLA circuit delay and power-delay product (PDP) of TFET are significantly better than FinFET due to its better I_on and C_g,ave and their smaller variability. However, the leakage power of TFET CLA is larger than FinFET CLA due to the worse I_off variability of TFET devices. Full article

This paper develops an ultra-low power asynchronous circuit design methodology, called Multi-Threshold NULL Convention Logic (MTNCL), also known as Sleep Convention Logic (SCL), which combines Multi-Threshold CMOS (MTCMOS) with NULL Convention Logic (NCL), to yield significant power reduction without any of the drawbacks of applying MTCMOS to synchronous circuits. In contrast to other power reduction techniques that usually result in large area overhead, MTNCL circuits are actually smaller than their original NCL versions. MTNCL utilizes high-V_t transistors to gate power and ground of a low-V_t logic block to provide for both fast switching and very low leakage power when idle. To demonstrate the advantages of MTNCL, a number of 32-bit IEEE single-precision floating-point co-processors were designed for comparison using the 1.2 V IBM 8RF-LM 130 nm CMOS process: original NCL, MTNCL with just combinational logic (C/L) slept, Bit-Wise MTNCL (BWMTNCL), MTNCL with C/L and completion logic slept, MTNCL with C/L, completion logic, and registers slept, MTNCL with Safe Sleep architecture, and synchronous MTCMOS. These designs are compared in terms of throughput, area, dynamic energy, and idle power, showing the tradeoffs between the various MTNCL architectures, and that the best MTNCL design is much better than the original NCL design in all aspects, and much better than the synchronous MTCMOS design in terms of area, energy per operation, and idle power, although the synchronous design can operate faster. Full article

This work presents an analysis about the influence of the gate and source/drain underlap length (L_UL) on UTBB FDSOI (UltraThin-Body-and-Buried-oxide Fully-Depleted-Silicon-On-Insulator) devices operating in conventional (V_B = 0 V), dynamic threshold (DT, V_B = V_G), and the enhanced DT (eDT, V_B = kV_G) configurations, focusing on low power applications. It is shown that the underlap devices present a lower off-state current (I_OFF at V_G = 0 V), lower subthreshold swing (S), lower gate-induced drain leakage (GIDL), higher transconductance over drain current (gm/I_D) ratio and higher intrinsic voltage gain (|A_V|) due to their longer effective channel length in weak inversion and lower lateral electric field, while the eDT mode presents higher on-state current (I_ON) with the same I_OFF, lower S, higher maximum transconductance (gm_max), lower threshold voltage (V_T), higher gm/I_D ratio and higher |A_V| due to the dynamically reduced threshold voltage and stronger transversal electric field. Full article

To minimize energy consumption of a digital circuit, logic can be operated at sub- or near-threshold voltage. Operation at this region is challenging due to device and environment variations, and resulting performance may not be adequate to all applications. This article presents two variants of a 32-bit RISC CPU targeted for near-threshold voltage. Both CPUs are placed on the same die and manufactured in 28 nm CMOS process. They employ timing-error prevention with clock stretching to enable operation with minimal safety margins while maximizing performance and energy efficiency at a given operating point. Measurements show minimum energy of 3.15 pJ/cyc at 400 mV, which corresponds to 39% energy saving compared to operation based on static signoff timing. Full article

Modern systems-on-chip (SoCs) today contain hundreds of cores, and this number is predicted to reach the thousands by the year 2020. As the number of communicating elements increases, there is a need for an efficient, scalable and reliable communication infrastructure. As technology geometries shrink to the deep submicron regime, however, the communication delay and power consumption of global interconnections become the major bottleneck. The network-on-chip (NoC) design paradigm, based on a modular packet-switched mechanism, can address many of the on-chip communication issues, such as the performance limitations of long interconnects and integration of large number of cores on a chip. Recently, new communication technologies based on the NoC concept have emerged with the aim of improving the scalability limitations of conventional NoC-based architectures. Among them, wireless NoCs (WiNoCs) use the radio medium for reducing the performance and energy penalties of long-range and multi-hop communications. As the radio medium can be accessed by a single transmitter at a time, a radio access control mechanism (RACM) is needed. In this paper, we present a novel RACM, which allows one to improve both the performance and energy figures of the WiNoC. Experiments, carried out on both synthetic and real traffic scenarios, have shown the effectiveness of the proposed RACM. On average, a 30% reduction in communication delay and a 25% energy savings have been observed when the proposed RACM is applied to a known WiNoC architecture. Full article