Low-power operation using self-timed circuits and adaptive scaling of the supply voltage

  • Authors:
  • Lars S. Nielsen;Cees Niessen

  • Affiliations:
  • Technical Univ. of Denmark, Lyngby, Denmark;Philips Research Labs, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems - Special issue on low-power design
  • Year:
  • 1994

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Recent research has demonstrated that for certain types of applications like sampled audio systems, self-timed circuits can achieve very low power consumption, because unused circuit parts automatically turn into a stand-by mode. Additional savings may be obtained by combining the self-timed circuits with a mechanism that adaptively adjusts the supply voltage to the smallest possible, while maintaining the performance requirements. This paper describes such a mechanism, analyzes the possible power savings, and presents a demonstrator chip that has been fabricated and tested. The idea of voltage scaling has been used previously in synchronous circuits, and the contributions of the present paper are: 1) the combination of supply scaling and self-timed circuitry which has some unique advantages, and 2) the thorough analysis of the power savings that are possible using this technique.