Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

The Computer Engineering and Systems Group

Extreme Low Power/Energy System Design

 


Power consumption has become a zeroth order design constraint in digital design today, for both tethered and mobile electronics. My group has made several contributions to this area, by demonstrating practical means to develop extreme low power circuit designs.

 

The use of sub-threshold circuits enables significant power savings (100X-500X for a 90nm fabrication process) with a modest reduction in operating speed. However, sub-threshold circuits exhibit a delay variation of between 100X and 1000X when factors like temperature, processing and power supply variations are accounted for. As a result, they have not been used in practical IC products so far.

My group has solved the sub-threshold delay variation problem by using an adaptive bulk biasing (ABB) scheme. Raising or lowering the bulk node voltage can speed up or slow down a VLSI circuit. ABB involves dynamically adjusting the bulk node voltage in a closed-loop fashion, to lock the circuit delay to a user-specified value. Using NSF and LLNL funding, my group fabricated a 250nm ABB based sub-threshold circuit with complete success, demonstrating a 20X power improvement. A conservative improvement of 100X is estimated if we had used a 90nm process. This work was initially part of an interdisciplinary project whose goal was to develop extreme low power, insect-borne electronics.

In addition, we have developed techniques to find the supply voltage that minimizes the energy of a sub-threshold design, as well as asynchronous micropipelining approaches to recover the delay penalty (by 7X) of sub-threshold designs. Other work in this area includes low power/energy bus design for data transfers, as well as low power SRAM memory design.

Publications, patents and artefacts:

  • “A Variation-tolerant Sub-threshold Design Approach”, Jayakumar, Khatri. Design Automation Conference (DAC), 2005 Anaheim, CA , June 13-17, pp. 716-719. This paper first presented our ABB based delay variation canceling methodology, and achieves a 2 order of magnitude reduction in delay variation compared to the case where no delay compensation is done. Presentation slides.
  • “Minimum Energy Near-threshold Network of PLA based Design”, Jayakumar, Khatri. International Conference on Computer Design (ICCD) 2005, Oct 2-5, San Jose, CA, pp. 399-404. This paper reports our findings on techniques to find the energy-minimizing supply voltage for sub-threshold designs. The paper shows that for energy minimality, the supply voltage is slightly above the threshold voltage, and depends on logic depth. Presentation Slides.
  • “A PLA based Asynchronous Micropipelining Approach for Subthreshold Circuit Design”, Jayakumar, Garg, Gamache, Khatri. ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC), July 24-28 2006, pp. 419-424. This paper describes our work on reclaiming the speed penalty of sub-threshold designs by micropipelining. This paper achieves a 7X speedup over a non-micropipelined approach, with a 47%. Presentation slides.
  • “Design and Implementation of a Sub-threshold BFSK Transmitter”, Paul, Garg, Khatri, Vaidya. International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design (ISQED) San Jose, CA. Mar 16-18 2009. This paper describes the design methodology used in designing our sub-threshold transmitter IC, along with results obtained from silicon. The chip achieves a 20X power reduction compared to a super-threshold implementation of the same circuit on the same die (in a 250nm process) Presentation slides.
  • “RF Receiver and Transmitter for Insect Mounted Sensor Platform”, Duperre, Burgett, Garg, Khatri. IEEE Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems (MWSCAS) 2009, Cancun, Mexico. August 2-5, 2009. This paper describes our work in designing the transmitter (which uses our sub-threshold transmitter IC) and receiver systems for the sponsored project.
  • Invited Paper“Extreme Low Power Computing using Sub-threshold Circuits”, Segundo Magno Congreso Interancional del CIC 2007, Mexico City, Mexico, November 6-8, 2007. This paper presented a summary of our work in sub-threshold system design.
  • “Encoding Serial Data for Graphical EDP/Energy Minimization”, Ekambavananan, Garg, Khatri. Accepted for publication at the Journal of Low Power Electronics (JOLPE), Vol. 5, No. 2, August 2009. This paper reports on methods for reducing energy and the energy-delay-product for serial data transmission, using a 3-codebook algorithm.
  • “Selective Forward Body Bias for High Speed and Low Power SRAMs”, Bollapalli, Garg, Gulati, Khatri. Accepted for publication at the Journal of Low Power Electronics (JOLPE), Vol. 5, No. 2, August 2009. In this paper, we design a SRAM with devices that are nominally reverse biased, and are forward biased just in time for an access. We show that not only does the modified SRAM consume less power, but it is also faster.
  • “Energy Efficient and High Speed On-Chip Ternary Bus”, Duan, Khatri. Design Automation, and Test in Europe (DATE) Conference 2008, 10-14 March, Munich, Germany, pp. 515-518. In this paper, we present a half-swing, encoded ternary bus design. Although the bus drives 3 voltages, they are encoded to 2 logic values, yielding a faster, lower power bus design.
  • “Minimizing and Exploiting Leakage in VLSI Design”, Jayakumar, Paul, Garg, Khatri. Monograph published by Springer Publishers. 1st edition, 2010. 214p. ISBN 978-1-4419-0949-7. This monograph describes our work in sub-threshold design, as well as leakage minimization.
  • U.S. Patent 7880505: “Low Power Reconfigurable Circuits with Delay Compensation”, Khatri, Vaidya, Griffin, Jayakumar. Issued Feb 2011. This patent on extreme low power reconfigurable circuit technology was filed through Texas A&M.