TY  - THES
AB  - The demand of low power consumption in microelectronics circuits has increased
significantly as submicron technologies scale down. Battery operated portable
applications are in high demand across the industries such as automotive, medical,
MEMS, telecommunication and so on. Subthreshold operations provides the
potential solution to the energy consumption problem. However, it comes at
the price of significant degradation of performance. Since, it needs to reduce
the maximum operating clock frequency in subthreshold operation. An effective
solution proposed to such problem was to have different voltage islands. Here, the
non-critical power constrained blocks could run in subthreshold domain with the
critical ones operating in above threshold domain. Our work proposes a solution
to combat such a problem.
Our work consists of three parts; 1) a standard cell library optimized for subthreshold
operation, 2) couple of level shifter circuits capable of sub-threshold to
above threshold voltage conversion and 3) a subthreshold memory array. We have
used the 28nm FD-SOI technology from ST Microelectronics.
The standard cell library contains basic design cell units, whose dimensions are
optimized for subthreshold operation at a low fixed frequency. The optimization
process is based upon a multiobjective optimization methodology. Propagation
delay, switching power, static power dissipation and, noise margin are the parameters,
chosen for multiobjective optimization. We generated separate sets of
dimensions for each cells due to the optimization algorithm, which helped us
to design the parametric cell (p-cell). We used the p-cell approach as it helps to
standardize the cell design reducing the development time. The library is ready
for the synthesis of low power blocks. The library is developed with two different
variants of transistors, namely RVT and LVT. They have different threshold voltages.
The RVT library has 21 combinatorial logic cells, 4 sequential logic cells and
11 clock circuits. The LVT library has only combinatorial cells.
We designed two different level shifter circuits, which are performance optimized
with the library cells in terms of voltage and frequency. The leakage current
loss was kept in mind while doing the design. We have followed the circuit mirror
topology for one of the circuits. This circuit can operate convert an input of 250mV
to 1V output. The leakage power of this circuit is 37pW. The second level shifter
circuit is a combination of both circuit mirror and cross-coupled PMOS topologies.
This particular circuit can operate even at 150mV supply, with the leakage power
being 107pW.
Memory circuits consume a lot of energy. Although it is difficult to reduce the
operating voltage of memory cells, without diminishing the performance. Here,
we proposed a 4x8 SRAM array, which can operate with a minimum supply of
250mV and a maximum frequency of 3.3 MHz. During the read operation, the
energy consumption of the memory cell is 0.107 fJ at 3.33MHZ.
DA  - 2022
DO  - 10.4119/unibi/2960543
LA  - eng
PY  - 2022
TI  - Design of low-power digital circuits in the sub-threshold domain
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0070-pub-29605435
Y2  - 2024-12-25T17:35:16
ER  -