ADAPTIVE SUPPLY VOLTAGE MANAGEMENT FOR LOW POWER LOGIC CIRCUITRY OPERATING AT SUBTHRESHOLD

Rehan Ahmed

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater,OK, USA

ABSTRACT

With the rise in demand of portable hand held devices and with the rise in application of wireless sensor networks and RFID reduction of total power consumption has become a necessity. To save power we operate the logic circuitry of our devices at sub-threshold. In sub-threshold the drain current is exponentially dependent on the threshold voltage hence the threshold variation causes profound variation of ION and IOFF the ratio of which affect the speed of a circuit drastically. So to mitigate this problem we present a adaptive power management circuit which will determine the minimum required supply voltage to meet the timing requirement. Also to reduce the power overhead and avoid bulky coil and EMI noise we used the switch capacitor power regulator to regulate and manage power instead of linear dropout (LDO) and Inductor base switch mode power converter.

KEYWORDS Adaptive; Low power; Switch Capacitor; Converter; Sub-threshold

ORIGINAL SOURCE URL: http://aircconline.com/vlsics/V6N2/6215vlsi01.pdf

VOLUME LINK: http://airccse.org/journal/vlsi/vol6.html