• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.42 no.2 s.332
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• pp.31-40
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• 2005

The Multi-Threshold CMOS (MTCMOS) technology provides a solution to the high performance and low power design requirements of mobile computing applications. In this paper, we (i) motivate the post-mask-tooling performance enhancement technique combined with the MTCMOS leakage current suppression technology, and (ii) develop a practical MTCMOS ASIC design methodology which fine-tunes and integrates best-in-class techniques and commercially available tools to fix the new design issues related to the MTCMOS technology. Towards validating the proposed techniques, a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) processor has been implemented using the methodology, and a 0.18um Process. The fabricated PDA processor operates at 333MHz which has been improved about $23\%$ at no additional cost of redesign and masks, and consumes about 2uW of standby mode leakage power which could have been three orders of magnitude larger if the MTCMOS technology was not applied.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.4 no.4
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• pp.263-268
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• 2004

In this paper, we motivate the post-mask performance enhancement technique combined with the Multi-Threshold Voltage CMOS (MTCMOS) leakage current suppression technology, and integrate the new design issues related to the MTCMOS technology into the ASIC design methodology. The issues include short-circuit current and sneak leakage current prevention. Towards validating the proposed techniques, a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) processor has been implemented using the methodology, and a 0.18um process. The fabricated PDA processor operates at 333MHz which has been improved about 23% at no additional cost of redesign and masks, and consumes about 2uW of standby mode leakage power which could have been three orders of magnitude larger if the MTCMOS technology was not applied.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.41 no.10
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• pp.77-83
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• 2004

In low-power VLSI systems, it is effective to suppress leakage current by shutting down megablocks in idle states. Recently, multi-threshold voltage CMOS (MTCMOS) is widely accepted to shutdown power supply. However, it requires short wake-up time as operating frequency increases. This causes large current surge during wake-up process, and it often leads to system malfunction due to severe Power line noise. In this paper, a novel wake-up scheme is proposed to solve this problem. It exploits pipelined wake-up strategy in several stages that reduces maximum current on the power line and its corresponding power line noise. To evaluate its efficiency, the proposed scheme was applied to a multiplier block in the Compact Flash memory controller chip. Power line noise in shutdown and wake-up process was simulated and analyzed. From the simulation results, the proposed scheme was proven to greatly reduce the power line noise compared with conventional schemes.

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.33 no.3
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• pp.147-151
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• 2024

The importance of Wireless Sensor Networks is becoming more evident owing to their practical applications in various areas. However, the energy problem remains a critical barrier to the progress of WSNs. By reducing the energy consumed by the sensor nodes that constitute WSNs, the performance and lifespan of WSNs will be enhanced. In this study, we introduce an energy-efficient ternary modulator that employs multi-threshold CMOS for logic conversion. We optimized the design with a low-power ternary gate structure based on a pass transistor using the MTCMOS process. Our design uses 71.69% fewer transistors compared to the previous design. To demonstrate the improvements in our design, we conducted the HSPICE simulation using a CMOS 180 nm process with a 1.8V supply voltage. The simulation results show that the proposed ternary modulator is more energy-efficient than the previous modulator. Power-delay product, a benchmark for energy efficiency, is reduced by 97.19%. Furthermore, corner simulations demonstrate that our modulator is stable against PVT variations.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2007.07a
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• pp.433-434
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• 2007

This paper describes a low-voltage dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) focusing on subthreshold leakage reduction during self-refresh (sleep) mode. By sharing a power switch, multiple iterative circuits such as row and column decoders have a significantly reduced subthreshold leakage current. To reduce the leakage current of complex logic gates, dual channel length scheme and input vector control method are used. Because all node voltages during the standby mode are deterministic, zigzag super-cutoff CMOS is used, allowing to Preserve internal data. MTCMOS technique Is also used in the circuits having no need to preserve internal data. Sub-1.2-V 1-Gb mobile DDR DRAM employing all these low-power techniques was designed in a 60 nm CMOS technology and achieved over 77% reduction of overall leakage current during the self-refresh mode.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.43 no.6 s.348
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• pp.47-52
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• 2006

This paper proposes a novel low-power $32bit\times32bit$ multiplier for deep submicron technologies beyond 130nm. As technology becomes small, static power due to leakage current significantly increases, and it becomes comparable to dynamic power. Recently, shutdown method based on MTCMOS is widely used to reduce both dynamic and static power. However, it suffers from severe power line noise when restoring whole large-size functional block. Therefore, the proposed multiplier mitigates this noise by shutting down and waking up sequentially along with pipeline stage. Fabricated chip measurement results in $0.35{\mu}m$ technology and gate-transition-level simulation results in 130nm and 90nm technologies show that it consumes $66{\mu}W,\;13{\mu}W,\;and\;6{\mu}W$ in idle mode, respectively, and it reduces power consumption to $0.04%\sim0.08%$ of active mode. As technology becomes small, power reduction efficiency degrades in the conventional clock gating scheme, but the proposed multiplier does not.