Design Techniques and Tools to Enable and Enhance Coarse-Grain Power Gating in ASIC Designs
Coarse-Grain MTCMOS Sleep Transistor Sizing Using Delay Budgeting — Current state-of-the-art sleep transistor sizing algorithms minimize the total sleep transistor width subject to a maximum IR voltage drop on the virtual node of each MTCMOS switch cell. In these approaches, the DC noise constraint for the virtual node of a switch cell is somehow related to the tolerable delay increase in the circuit. Using a single maximum IR voltage drop value on all virtual nodes is over constraining the problem. Instead, we would like to set the DC noise constraint for the virtual node of each MTCMOS switch based on the minimum tolerable delay increase (i.e., the positive timing slack) for any logic cell in the corresponding module. The voltage drop allocation on the virtual nodes of the MTCMOS switches should thus be closely related to the timing slack allocation to individual cells in the circuit. In a DATE-08 paper, we introduced a new approach for minimizing the total sleep transistor width for a coarse-grain MTCMOS circuit assuming a given standard cell and sleep transistor placement. Our algorithm takes a maximum allowed circuit slowdown factor and produces the sizes of various sleep transistors in the standard cell layout while considering the DC parasitics of the virtual ground net. We showed that the problem can be formulated as a sizing with delay budgeting problem and solved efficiently using a heuristic sizing algorithm which implicitly performs maximum current calculation through sleep transistors while accounting for different current flow paths in the virtual ground net through adjacent sleep transistors. This technique uses at least 40% less total sleep transistor width compared to other approaches.
Sizing and Placement of Charge Recycling Transistors in MTCMOS Circuits — In an ICCAD-07 paper, we showed that the sizing and placement problems of charge-recycling transistors in charge-recycling multi-threshold CMOS (CR-MTCMOS) can be formulated as a linear programming problem, and hence, can be efficiently solved using standard mathematical programming packages. The proposed sizing and placement techniques allow us to employ the CR-MTCMOS solution in large row-based standard cell layouts while achieving nearly the full potential of this power-gating architecture, i.e., we achieve 44% saving in switching energy due to the mode transition in CR-MTCMOS compared to standard MTCMOS.
Charge Recycling in MTCMOS Circuits: Concept and Analysis — Design of a suitable power gating (e.g., multi-threshold CMOS or super cutoff CMOS) structure is an important and challenging task in sub-90nm VLSI circuits where leakage currents are significant. In designs where the mode transitions are frequent, a significant amount of energy is consumed to turn on or off the power gating structure. It is thus desirable to develop a power gating solution that minimizes the energy consumed during mode transitions. In a DAC-06 paper and an IEEE SSCS DLP talk in October 2006, we described such a solution by recycling charge between the virtual power and ground rails immediately after entering the sleep mode and just before wakeup. The proposed method can save up to 43% of the dynamic energy wasted during mode transition while maintaining the wake-up time of the original circuit. It also reduces the peak negative voltage value and the settling time of the ground bounce.