Exploration and Design of Low-Energy Logic Cells for 1 kHz Always-on Systems

摘要

A standard cell library targeting always-on operation at 1 kHz is designed at circuit-level. This paper proposes a design methodology to achieve robust operation with minimum energy. Such minimum energy per operation for always-on systems is achieved by one specific supply and threshold voltage V_Th combination. As V_Th is discrete in a practical bulk technology, this minimum can however not be achieved through simple voltage tuning. In the considered 90 nm CMOS technology, V_Th is too low resulting in leakage dominated systems and preventing from attaining the minimum energy point in subthreshold. Three circuit techniques are optimally combined to fight leakage: stacking, reverse body biasing and optimal transistor dimensioning relying on second order effects of the dimensions on V_Th. They jointly allow logic gates to achieve the best balance between dynamic and leakage power. Moreover, the paper presents modified flip-flop topologies that also reliably operate at 0.27 V along with the gates. Benefits of improved logic gates and flip-flops are demonstrated on a small always-on feature-extraction system calculating running average and variance on a 1 Ksample/s data stream. The resulting system consumes 162 pW in simulation, or two orders of magnitude less when compared to a commercial library at its 1 V nominal voltage, or 1 order of magnitude less when compared to the commercial library at the same 0.27 V operating voltage.