V/sub TH/-hopping scheme for 82% power saving in low-voltage processors

Abstract

A threshold voltage hopping (V/sub TH/-hopping) scheme is proposed where V/sub TH/ is dynamically controlled through software depending on a workload. V/sub TH/-hopping is shown to reduce the power to 18% of the fixed low-V/sub TH/ circuits in 0.5 V supply voltage regime for multimedia applications. A positive back-gate bias scheme within V/sub TH/-hopping is presented for the high-performance and low-voltage processors. The measurement result shows about 90% leakage power reduction is possible by using V/sub TH/-hopping.