Analyzing and minimizing effects of temperature variation and NBTI on active leakage power of power-gated circuits

Abstract

Power-gating (PG) techniques have been widely used in modern digital ICs to reduce their standby leakage power during idle periods. Meanwhile, virtual supply voltage (VVDD) of a power-gated IC is a function of strength of a PG device and total current flowing through it. Thus, the VVDD level becomes susceptible to 1) negative bias temperature instability (NBTI) degradation that weakens the PG device over time and 2) temporal temperature variation that affects active leakage current (thus total current) of the IC. To account for the NBTI degradation, the PG device must be upsized such that it guarantees a minimum VVDD level that prevents any timing failure over chip lifetime. Moreover, the PG device is also sized for the worst-case voltage drop partly resulted by a large amount of active leakage current at high temperature. However, increasing the size of the PG device to consider both effects leads to higher VVDD (thus active leakage power) than necessary at low temperature and/or in early chip lifetime. To minimize active leakage power increase due to these effects, we propose two techniques that adjust strength of a PG device based on its usage and IC's temperature at runtime. Both techniques are applied to an experimental setup modeling total current consumption of an IC in 32nm technology and their efficacy is demonstrated in the presence of within-die spatial process and temperature variations. On average of 100 die samples, they can reduce active leakage power by up to 10% in early chip lifetime.