Title
Device-aware yield-centric dual-Vt design under parameter variations in nanoscale technologies
Abstract
Dual-Vt design technique has proven to be extremely effective in reducing subthreshold leakage in both active and standby mode of operation of a circuit in submicrometer technologies. However, aggressive scaling of technology results in different leakage components (subthreshold, gate and junction tunneling) to become significant portion of total power dissipation in CMOS circuits. High-Vt devices are expected to have high junction tunneling current (due to stronger halo doping) compared to low-Vt devices, which in the worst case can increase the total leakage in dual-Vt design. Moreover, process parameter variations (and in turn Vt variations) are expected to be significantly high in sub-50-nm technology regime, which can severely affect the yield. In this paper, we propose a device aware simultaneous sizing and dual-Vt design methodology that considers each component of leakage and the impact of process variation (on both delay and leakage power) to minimize the total leakage while ensuring a target yield. Our results show that conventional dual-Vt design can overestimate leakage savings by 36% while incurring 17% average yield loss in 50-nm predictive technology. The proposed scheme results in 10%-20% extra leakage power savings compared to conventional dual-Vt design, while ensuring target yield: This paper also shows that nonscalability of the present way of realizing high-Vt devices results in negligible power savings beyond 25-nm technology. Hence, different dual-Vt process options, such as metal gate work function engineering, are required to realize high-performance and low-leakage dual-Vt designs in future technologies.
Year
DOI
Venue
2007
10.1109/TVLSI.2007.898683
IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration Systems
Keywords
DocType
Volume
different leakage component,extra leakage power saving,dual-Vt design,nanoscale technology,total leakage,leakage saving,different dual-Vt process option,target yield,leakage power,parameter variation,subthreshold leakage,conventional dual-Vt design,Device-aware yield-centric dual-Vt design
Journal
15
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
6
1063-8210
6
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.49
14
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Amit Agarwal169372.95
Kunhyuk Kang239329.36
Swarup Bhunia31952168.49
James D. Gallagher4131.14
Kaushik Roy57093822.19