Adaptive supply voltage technique for low swing interconnects

Abstract

-The increase in power consumption due to interconnects and the variation in delays (delay spread) among long interconnects are becoming important issues for design of high performance and low power circuits in scaled technologies. In this paper we propose an adaptive supply voltage technique for low swing interconnects. The proposed technique assigns different supply voltages to drive interconnects based on their delay. The voltage assignment is done only once during the initialization period of the circuit. Hence, there is no extra power consumption in the active mode. We also show that there is an optimum number of supply voltages required to achieve maximum power saving. Simulation results show that for a set of 64 buses we can achieve 42.8% and 55.9% reductions in the power consumption and delay spread, respectively.

Process Variation-Aware Vdd Assignment Technique for Repeated Interconnects

“…Any methodology similar to the one proposed by Jeong et al [8] can be used to supply the multiple VddS. Since we are assigning multiple VddS we require level converters at the end of each interconnect to restore the levels back to nominal voltages.…”

“…Adaptive Vdd techniques have been proposed before by [8] for low swing interconnects to reduce power consumption. Our work focuses on reducing the delay spread due to processinduced parameter variations with specific focus on Leff with negligible power overhead.…”