The design and performance of a sub-nanoampere two-stage power management circuit that uses off-chip capacitors for energy accumulation are presented. Focusing on the leakage current and the transition time of the power switch transistor, we estimated the minimum current for accumulating. On the basis of the results, we devised a two-stage power management architecture for sub-nanoampere operation. The simulated and experimental results for the power management circuit describe the accumulating operation with a 1-nA current source.

CMOS circuits consume great dynamic power in switching. It has been proposed that energy transfer through a rising Vdd dissipates small amounts of energy. In typical power gate circuits, the high-performance PMOS transistors (PSW) that connect the circuit blocks to the power supply reduce leakage power by shutting off outer power (Vdd) to the idle blocks. We expand this technique by utilizing active PSW, which are turned on and off by clock signal. The PSW are fully turned on only for half of each clock cycle. This means that sufficient Vdd is provided to the circuit continuously for half of each clock cycle. In this manner, the circuit charge and discharge actions are cycle occur in different phases, and ramp Vdd is supplied to the designed circuit; we name this technique "CKVdd." CKVdd is a clock-controlled self-stabilized voltage technique, which generates stable ramp voltage to suppress the currents effectively. It is proposed to reduce dynamic power dissipation in conventional CMOS digital circuits. As compared to the conventional circuit, the circuits using CKVdd technique possesses several characteristics that differ from those of the current circuits using constant Vdd power source. First, CKVdd technique combines the power source and clock signal; it is an efficient low power technique. Second, CKVdd propose a feasible method to generate ramp-Vdd and low-Vdd. This technique would be convenient used to design generic low power digital circuits. Third, normal CMOS circuits show the dynamic power consumption increase proportional to the clock frequency. CKVdd results in a lower-than-usual frequency dependency, it is suitable used to design high clock speed circuits. In investigating constant Vdd for MPEG VLD decoders, CKVdd-circuit reduces 48% of the usual power dissipation and 88% of the usual peak current with small delay penalty.

This paper presents a hierarchical NoC architecture to support GT (Guaranteed Throughput) signals to process multimedia data in embedded systems. The architecture provides a communication environment that meets the diverse conditions of communication constraints among IPs in power and area. With a system based on packet switching, which requires storage/control circuits to support GT signals, it is hard to satisfy design constraints in area, scalability and power consumption. This paper proposes a hierarchical 444 mesh-type NoC architecture based on circuit switching, which is capable of processing GT signals requiring high throughput. The proposed NoC architecture shows reduction in area by 50.2% and in power consumption by 57.4% compared with the conventional NoC architecture based on circuit switching. These figures amount to by 72.4% and by 86.1%, when compared with an NoC architecture based on packet switching. The proposed NoC architecture operates in the maximum throughput of 19.2 Gb/s.