Gated Decap: Gate Leakage Control of On-Chip Decoupling Capacitors in Scaled Technologies

Abstract

To minimize the leakage power dissipation of present-day on-chip Decaps, we propose a gated decoupling capacitor (GDecap) technique that deactivates a Decap when it is not needed. The application of the proposed GDecap technique on an eight-way clock-gated clustered pipeline showed that on average, 41.7% Decap leakage power was reduced, with negligible ( 0 037%) worst-case performance degradation, at the 70-nm technology node. GDecap design incurred an area overhead of around 5.36% when compared with a conventional Decap design.