Subthreshold leakage current increases exponentially in deep-submicron processes and hence is a crucial factor in scaling down designs. Leakage power loss is a major concern in deep-submicron technologies as it drains the battery even when a circuit is completely idle. Efficient leakage control mechanisms are necessary to maximize battery life. In this paper, a novel technique that achieves cancellation of leakage effects in both the pull-up transistor (PUT) as well as the pull-down network (PDN) paths of DCVSL circuits is presented. It involves voltage balancing in these paths using sleep transistors. Experimental results show significant leakage power savings (average of 61X at a temperature of 27 o C) in DCVSL circuits employing this sleep circuitry when compared to standard DCVSL circuits. At any given temperature, using our methodology the leakage power loss for DCVSL circuits is constant. A 4.31X improvement (on an average) in leakage savings using our methodology was observed when compared with the traditional power-gating technique.
Leakage power loss is a major concern in deep-submicron technologies as it drains the battery even when a circuit is completely idle. In this paper, we first present a novel leakage reduction technique and then compare and contrast it with other well established leakage reduction techniques. Our leakage reduction technique achieves cancellation of leakage effects in both the pull-up network (PUN) as well as the pull-down network (PDN) for CMOS circuits. It involves voltage balancing in the PUN and PDN paths using a combination of high-
V
T
(high voltage threshold) and standard-
V
T
sleep transistors. Experiments conducted on a variety of multi-level combinational MCNC'91 benchmarks show significant savings in leakage power (upto 3 orders of magnitude), with lesser area and delay penalty using our leakage reduction technique when compared to other techniques.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.