Motivated by emerging battery-operated applications that demand intensive computation in portable environments, techniques are investigated which reduce power consumption in CMOS digital circuits while maintaining computational throughput. Techniques for low-power operation are shown which use the lowest possible supply voltage coupled with architectural, logic style, circuit, and technology optimization.An architectural-based scaling strategy is presented which indicates that the optimum voltage is much lower than that determined by other scaling considerations. This optimum is achieved by trading increased silicon area for reduced power consumption.

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This paper describes techniques and issues involved in the design of low-power VLSI circuits and systems. This work has been motivated by emerging battery operated applications that require extreme computation in portable environments. The four degrees of freedom available for the design of low-power VLSI -Technology, Circuit Approaches, Architectures, and Algorithmsare reviewed and the relative gains to be expected from each degree are presented.