VOLTAGE STACKING FOR SIMPLIFYING POWER MANAGEMENT IN ASYNCHRONOUS CIRCUITS
Andrew Suchanek1, Zhong Chen2 and Jia Di1
1Computer Science and Computer Engineering Department, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas, USA
2Electrical Engineering Department, University of Arkansas,Fayetteville, Arkansas, USA
ABSTRACT
Multiple power domains on a single integrated circuit (IC) are becoming more common due to the increasing complexity of systems on chips (SoCs) as process nodes continue to get smaller. Supplying the correct voltage to each domain requires the use of multiple voltage converters that occupy substantial space either on-chip or off-chip and introduce additional power loss in the conversions. In this paper, an asynchronous paradigm called Multi-Threshold NULL Convention Logic (MTNCL) is used to create a “stacked” architecture that reduces the number of converters needed and thereby mitigating the aforementioned problems. In this architecture, the MTNCL circuits are stacked between a multiple of VDD and GND, where simple control mechanisms alleviate the induced dynamic range fluctuation problem. The GLOBALFOUNDRIES 32nm Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) CMOS process is used to evaluate and analyze the theoretical effects of parasitic extracted physical implementations in stacking different circuits running different workloads. These results show that the “stacked” architecture introduce negligible overhead compared to the operation of the individual circuits while substantially alleviating the need for voltage converters, which in turn reduces the overall power consumption of the system.
KEYWORDS
Voltage stacking; power management; asynchronous; MTNCL
Original Source Link : http://aircconline.com/vlsics/V9N4/9418vlsi02.pdf
No comments:
Post a Comment