Design and optimization of low voltage high performance dual threshold CMOS circuits
DAC '98 Proceedings of the 35th annual Design Automation Conference
Low power synthesis of dual threshold voltage CMOS VLSI circuits
ISLPED '99 Proceedings of the 1999 international symposium on Low power electronics and design
Dual-threshold voltage assignment with transistor sizing for low power CMOS circuits
IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems
Proceedings of the 2003 international symposium on Low power electronics and design
Switching-activity driven gate sizing and Vth assignment for low power design
ASP-DAC '06 Proceedings of the 2006 Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference
Leakage power reduction using stress-enhanced layouts
Proceedings of the 45th annual Design Automation Conference
On stress aware active area sizing, gate sizing, and repeater insertion
Proceedings of the 2009 international symposium on Physical design
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Recent research on low power circuits make use of dual VT and strained silicon technologies. Low VT assignment on performance critical paths improves performance at the expense of leakage current. Strained silicon devices on the other hand have greater leakage but provide much larger ON current. The increased drive strength can be used to reduce gate sizes. In this work we show that selective use of strained silicon gates in high-activity critical paths reduce overall power due to decreased dynamic power arising from smaller gate sizes, that more than offset increased leakage due to strained silicon gate. Similarly, we find that up-sizing gates in low-activity critical paths reduce total power. Even though up-sized gates dissipate more dynamic power, lower switching activity, coupled with lower leakage compared to low VT devices make this a better choice. An optimization algorithm based on slack distribution between low and high switching activity gates is presented. Simulation results show an overall power benefit of 5.4% while improving performance by 15% even though overall leakage is 1% higher than original circuit.