Low power synthesis of dual threshold voltage CMOS VLSI circuits

Abstract

The use of dual threshold voltages can significantly reduce the static power dissipated in CMOS VLSI circuits. With the supply voltage at 1 V and threshold voltage as low as 0.2 V the subthreshold leakage power of transistors starts dominating the dynamic power. Also, many times a large number of devices spend a long time in a standby mode where the leakage power is the only source of power consumption. We present a near-optimal approach to synthesize low static power CMOS VLSI circuits with two threshold voltages that reduces power consumption compared with a previous approach by upto 29.45%. Also, presented is a technique which finds static power optimal configurations for CMOS VLSI circuits when arbitrary number of threshold voltages are allowed.