NEC cuts 65nm standby power by two orders of magnitude

摘要

NEC has cut standby current leakage at the 65nm node by 30-100 x by using HfSiON as the high-k gate dielectric and a transistor structure optimized for Transmeta Corp.'s LongRun2 technology to dynamically adjust the body bias as well as the supply voltage. The company plans to use this same low-power technology in products across all applications, from portable phones emphasizing reduced power usage, to high-end servers focusing on fast performance. The approach reduces standby leakage current roughly from the range of 10~(-7)A to that of 10~(-9)A in high performance devices, or from around 10~(-10)A to around 10~(-12)A in low-power applications.