Comparative Study on Performance and Variation Tolerance of Low Power Circuit

Abstract

The demand for low-power electronic devices is increasing rapidly in current VLSI technology. Instead of conventional CMOS circuit operating at nominal supply voltage, several kinds of circuits are brought about with the goal of reducing power consumption. This research is mainly focused on evaluating performance, power and variation tolerance of near/sub-threshold computing and adiabatic logic circuits. Arithmetic logic units (ALUs) are designed with 15nm FinFET process technologies for these circuit styles. The evaluation is carried out by simulations on these ALU designs. The variation model considers ambient temperature variations and power supply fluctuations that emulate wireless sensor node applications. The results shows that conventional static CMOS circuit operating in near-threshold region exhibits similar power efficiency with adiabatic logic circuit operating in the same region, while at the same time it bears better temperature and voltage variation tolerance in most of the cases. The study results provide helpful guidance to low-power electronic system designs.