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Automatic synthesis of near-threshold circuits with fine-grained performance tunability

Published: 18 August 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Near-Threshold Circuits achieve ultra-low energy operating with significant performance improvement and noise immunity as compared to sub-threshold circuits. However, near-threshold circuit performance is highly sensitive to static and dynamic threshold voltage variations. This makes designing circuits for a target performance very difficult, and post-silicon tunability is required to achieve performance targets without taking huge design margins. In this work, we tackle this problem by proposing a novel dual-Vdd technique for near-threshold operation and show that one can tune the performance of a circuit in a fine-grained manner by powering an optimal sub-set of rows with a slightly higher supply voltage than the rest, without incurring the large cost of distributed level shifters. By varying the percentage of rows at a slightly higher voltage, one can trade-off performance and power in a fine-grained manner. Experimental results show that by employing our dual-Vdd technique, we can improve the performance of several benchmarks up-to 45% while achieving more than 50% lower power as compared to single-Vdd implementations.

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Cited By

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  • (2020)Cross-Layer Reliability, Energy Efficiency, and Performance Optimization of Near-Threshold Data PathsJournal of Low Power Electronics and Applications10.3390/jlpea1004004210:4(42)Online publication date: 3-Dec-2020
  • (2018)Balancing resiliency and energy efficiency of functional units in ultra-low power systemsProceedings of the 23rd Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference10.5555/3201607.3201754(637-644)Online publication date: 22-Jan-2018
  • (2018)Fine-Grained Energy-Constrained Microprocessor Pipeline DesignIEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems10.1109/TVLSI.2017.276754326:3(457-469)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2018
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ISLPED '10: Proceedings of the 16th ACM/IEEE international symposium on Low power electronics and design
    August 2010
    458 pages
    ISBN:9781450301466
    DOI:10.1145/1840845
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 18 August 2010

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    Author Tags

    1. dual VDD
    2. low power
    3. near threshold
    4. sub-threshold
    5. sub-threshold performance
    6. ultra low power
    7. variability compensation

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    Overall Acceptance Rate 398 of 1,159 submissions, 34%

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2020)Cross-Layer Reliability, Energy Efficiency, and Performance Optimization of Near-Threshold Data PathsJournal of Low Power Electronics and Applications10.3390/jlpea1004004210:4(42)Online publication date: 3-Dec-2020
    • (2018)Balancing resiliency and energy efficiency of functional units in ultra-low power systemsProceedings of the 23rd Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference10.5555/3201607.3201754(637-644)Online publication date: 22-Jan-2018
    • (2018)Fine-Grained Energy-Constrained Microprocessor Pipeline DesignIEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems10.1109/TVLSI.2017.276754326:3(457-469)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2018
    • (2018)Balancing resiliency and energy efficiency of functional units in ultra-low power systems2018 23rd Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC)10.1109/ASPDAC.2018.8297394(637-644)Online publication date: Jan-2018
    • (2017)Design flows for resilient energy-efficient systems2017 IEEE 23rd International Symposium on On-Line Testing and Robust System Design (IOLTS)10.1109/IOLTS.2017.8046243(233-236)Online publication date: Jul-2017
    • (2016)Variation-aware near threshold circuit synthesisProceedings of the 2016 Conference on Design, Automation & Test in Europe10.5555/2971808.2972097(1237-1242)Online publication date: 14-Mar-2016
    • (2012)A fine-grained many VT design methodology for ultra low voltage operationsProceedings of the 2012 ACM/IEEE international symposium on Low power electronics and design10.1145/2333660.2333702(161-166)Online publication date: 30-Jul-2012
    • (2011)Fine-Grained Power and Body-Bias Control for Near-Threshold Deep Sub-Micron CMOS CircuitsIEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems10.1109/JETCAS.2011.21592851:2(131-140)Online publication date: Jun-2011

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