Leakage power reduction through dual Vth assignment considering threshold voltage variation

Abstract

In today's sub-100nm CMOS technologies, leakage current has become an important part of the total power consumption, affecting both yields and lifetime of digital circuits. Dual Vth assignment, which is proven to be an effective method of reducing leakage power in the past, is also effective in today's technologies with certain modifications. In the paper, based on a statistical timing analysis (SSTA) framework we presented a dual Vth assignment method which can effectively reduce the leakage power even in the presence of large Vth variation. Besides, we use a statistical DAG pruning method which takes correlation between gates into account to speed up the dual Vth assignment algorithm. Experimental results show that statistical dual Vth assignment can reduce on average 40% more leakage current compared with conventional static method without affecting the performance constraints. Our DAG pruning method can reduce on average 30% gates in the circuit and save up to 50% of the total run time.