This paper describes a programmable differential bandgap reference (PD-BGR) for ultra-low-power IoT (Internet-of-Things) edge node devices. The PD-BGR consists of a current generator (CG) and differential voltage generator (DVG). The CG is based on a bandgap reference (BGR) and generates an operating current and a voltage, while the DVG generates another voltage from the current. A differential voltage reference can be obtained by taking the voltage difference from the voltages. The PD-BGR can produce a programmable differential output voltage by changing the multipliers of MOSFETs in a differential pair and resistance with digital codes. Simulation results showed that the proposed PD-BGR can generate 25- to 200-mV reference voltages with a 25-mV step within a ±0.7% temperature inaccuracy in a temperature range from -20 to 100°C. A Monte Carlo simulation showed that the coefficient of the variation in the reference was within 1.1%. Measurement results demonstrated that our prototype chips can generate stable programmable differential output voltages, almost the same results as those of the simulation. The average power consumption was only 88.4 nW, with a voltage error of -4/+3 mV with 5 samples.

Extremely low-voltage charge pump (ELV-CP) and its dedicated multi-stage driver (MS-DRV) for sub-60-mV thermoelectric energy harvesting are proposed. The proposed MS-DRV utilizes the output voltages of each ELV-CP to efficiently boost the control clock signals. The boosted clock signals are used as switching signals for each ELV-CP and MS-DRV to turn switch transistors on and off. Moreover, reset transistors are added to the MS-DRV to ensure an adequate non-overlapping period between switching signals. Measurement results demonstrated that the proposed MS-DRV can generate boosted clock signals of 350 mV from input voltage of 60 mV. The ELV-CP can boost the input voltage of 100 mV with 10.7% peak efficiency. The proposed ELV-CP and MS-DRV can boost the low input voltage of 56 mV.

Reliability is an important figure of merit of the system and it must be satisfied in safety-critical applications. This paper considers parallel applications on heterogeneous embedded systems and proposes a two-phase algorithm framework to minimize energy consumption for satisfying applications’ reliability requirement. The first phase is for initial assignment and the second phase is for either satisfying the reliability requirement or improving energy efficiency. Specifically, when the application’s reliability requirement cannot be achieved via the initial assignment, an algorithm for enhancing the reliability of tasks is designed to satisfy the application’s reliability requirement. Considering that the reliability of initial assignment may exceed the application’s reliability requirement, an algorithm for reducing the execution frequency of tasks is designed to improve energy efficiency. The proposed algorithms are compared with existing algorithms by using real parallel applications. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms consume less energy while satisfying the application’s reliability requirements.

To reduce the common mode voltage (CMV), suppress the CMV spikes, and improve the steady-state performance, a simplified reactive torque model predictive control (RT-MPC) for induction motors (IMs) is proposed. The proposed prediction model can effectively reduce the complexity of the control algorithm with the direct torque control (DTC) based voltage vector (VV) preselection approach. In addition, the proposed CMV suppression strategy can restrict the CMV within ±Vdc/6, and does not require the exclusion of non-adjacent non-opposite VVs, thus resulting in the system showing good steady-state performance. The effectiveness of the proposed design has been tested and verified by the practical experiment. The proposed algorithm can reduce the execution time by an average of 26.33% compared to the major competitors.

The influence of the gate voltage or base pair ratio modulation on the λ-DNA FET performance was examined. The result of the gate voltage modulation indicated that the captured electrons in the guanine base of the λ-DNA molecules greatly influenced the Id-Vd characteristics, and that of the base pair ratio modulation indicated that the tendency of the conductivity was partly clarified by considering the activation energy of holes and electrons and the length and numbers of the serial AT or GC sequences over which the holes or electrons jumped. In addition, the influence of the dimensionality of the DNA molecule on the conductivity was discussed theoretically.

Recent embedded systems require both traditional machinery control and information processing, such as network and GUI handling. A dual-OS platform consolidates a real-time OS (RTOS) and general-purpose OS (GPOS) to realize efficient software development on one physical processor. Although the dual-OS platform attracts increasing attention, it often suffers from energy inefficiency in the GPOS for guaranteeing real-time responses of the RTOS. This paper proposes an energy minimization method called DVFS virtualization, which allows running multiple DVFS policies dedicated to the RTOS and GPOS, respectively. The experimental evaluation using a commercial microcontroller showed that the proposed hardware could change the supply voltage within 500 ns and reduce the energy consumption of typical applications by 60 % in the best case compared to conventional dual-OS platforms. Furthermore, evaluation using a commercial microprocessor achieved a 15 % energy reduction of practical open-source software at best.

An output voltage estimation and regulation system for a wireless power transfer (WPT) circuit is proposed. Since the fluctuation of a coupling condition and/or a load may vary the voltage supplied with WPT resulting in a malfunction of wireless-powered devices, the output voltage regulation is needed. If the output voltage is regulated by a voltage regulator in a secondary side of the WPT circuit with fixed input power, the voltage regulator wastes the power to regulate the voltage. Therefore the output voltage regulation using a primary-side control, which adjusts the input power depending on the load and/or the coupling condition, is a promising approach for efficient regulation. In addition, it is desirable to eliminate feedback loop from the secondary side to the primary side from the viewpoint of reducing power dissipation and system complexity. The proposed system can estimate and regulate the output voltage independent of both the coupling and the load variation without the feedback loop. An usable range of the coupling coefficient and the load is improved compared to previous works. The validity of the proposed system is confirmed by the SPICE simulator.

Precision microwave measurement systems require highly stable oscillators with both excellent long-term and short-term stability. Compared to components used in laboratory instruments, dielectric resonator oscillators (DRO) offer low phase noise with greatly reduced mechanical complexity. To further enhance performance, phase-locked loop (PLL) stabilization can be used to eliminate drift and provide precise frequency control. In this work, the design of a low-cost DRO concept is presented and its performance is evaluated through simulations and measurements. An open-loop phase noise of -107.2 dBc/Hz at 10 kHz offset frequency and 12.8 GHz output frequency is demonstrated. Drift and phase noise are reduced by a PLL, so that a very low jitter of under 29.6 fs is achieved over the entire operating bandwidth.

A power-scalable sub-sampling phase-locked loop (SSPLL) is proposed for realizing dual-mode operation; high-performance mode with good phase noise and power-saving mode with moderate phase noise. It is the most efficient way to reduce power consumption by lowering the supply voltage. However, there are several issues with the low-supply millimeter-wave (mmW) SSPLL. This work discusses some techniques, such as a back-gate forward body bias (FBB) technique, in addition to employing a CMOS deeply depleted channel process (DDC).

We developed a self-controllable voltage level (SVL) circuit and applied this circuit to a single-power-supply, six-transistor complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor static random-access memory (SRAM) to not only improve both write and read performances but also to achieve low standby power and data retention (holding) capability. The SVL circuit comprises only three MOSFETs (i.e., pull-up, pull-down and bypass MOSFETs). The SVL circuit is able to adaptively generate both optimal memory cell voltages and word line voltages depending on which mode of operation (i.e., write, read or hold operation) was used. The write margin (VWM) and read margin (VRM) of the developed (dvlp) SRAM at a supply voltage (VDD) of 1V were 0.470 and 0.1923V, respectively. These values were 1.309 and 2.093 times VWM and VRM of the conventional (conv) SRAM, respectively. At a large threshold voltage (Vt) variability (=+6σ), the minimum power supply voltage (VMin) for the write operation of the conv SRAM was 0.37V, whereas it decreased to 0.22V for the dvlp SRAM. VMin for the read operation of the conv SRAM was 1.05V when the Vt variability (=-6σ) was large, but the dvlp SRAM lowered it to 0.41V. These results show that the SVL circuit expands the operating voltage range for both write and read operations to lower voltages. The dvlp SRAM reduces the standby power consumption (PST) while retaining data. The measured PST of the 2k-bit, 90-nm dvlp SRAM was only 0.957µW at VDD=1.0V, which was 9.46% of PST of the conv SRAM (10.12µW). The Si area overhead of the SVL circuits was only 1.383% of the dvlp SRAM.

This paper refers to the optimal voltage pair, which minimizes the energy consumption of LSI circuits under a target delay constraint, as a Minimum Energy Point (MEP). This paper proposes an approximation-based implementation method for an MEP tracking system over a wide voltage region. This paper focuses on the MEP characteristics that the energy loss is sufficiently small even though the voltage point changes near the MEP. For example, the energy loss is less than 5% even though the estimated MEP differs by a few tens of millivolts in comparison with the actual MEP. Therefore, the complexity for determining the MEP is relaxed by approximating complex operations such as the logarithmic or the exponential functions in the MEP tracking algorithm, which leads to hardware-/software-efficient implementation. When the MEP tracking algorithm is implemented in software, the MEP estimation time is reduced from 1ms to 13µs by the proposed approximation. When implemented in hardware, the proposed method can reduce the area of an MEP estimation circuit to a quarter. Measurement results of a 32-bit RISC-V processor fabricated in a 65-nm SOTB process technology show that the energy loss introduced by the proposed approximation is less than 2% in comparison with the MEP operation. Furthermore, we show that the MEP can be tracked within about 45 microseconds by the proposed MEP tracking system.

Quadrature voltage-controlled oscillators (VCOs) with current-weight-average and voltage-weight-average phase-adjusting architectures are studied. The phase adjusting equalizes the oscillation frequency to the LC-resonant frequency. The merits of the equalization are explained by using Leeson's phase noise equation and the impulse sensitivity function (ISF). Quadrature VCOs with the phase-adjusting architectures are fabricated using 180-nm TSMC CMOS and show low-phase-noise performances compared to a conventional differential VCO. The ISF analysis and small-signal analysis also show that the drawbacks of the current-weight-average phase-adjusting and voltage-weight-average phase-adjusting architectures are current-source noise effect and large additional capacitance, respectively. A voltage-average-adjusting circuit with a source follower at its input alleviates the capacitance increase.

Fast switching speed, low power consumption, and good stability are some of the important properties of spin transfer torque assisted voltage controlled magnetic anisotropy magnetic tunnel junction (STT-assisted VCMA-MTJ) which makes the non-volatile full adder (NV-FA) based on it attractive for Internet of Things. However, the effects of process variations on the performances of STT-assisted VCMA-MTJ and NV-FA will be more and more obvious with the downscaling of STT-assisted VCMA-MTJ and the improvement of chip integration. In this paper, a more accurate electrical model of STT-assisted VCMA-MTJ is established on the basis of the magnetization dynamics and the process variations in film growth process and etching process. In particular, the write voltage is reduced to 0.7 V as the film thickness is reduced to 0.9 nm. The effects of free layer thickness variation (γtf) and oxide layer thickness variation (γtox) on the state switching as well as the effect of tunnel magnetoresistance ratio variation (β) on the sensing margin (SM) are studied in detail. Considering that the above process variations follow Gaussian distribution, Monte Carlo simulation is used to study the effects of the process variations on the writing and output operations of NV-FA. The result shows that the state of STT-assisted VCMA-MTJ can be switched under -0.3%≤γtf≤6% or -23%≤γtox≤0.2%. SM is reduced by 16.0% with β increases from 0 to 30%. The error rates of writing ‘0’ in the NV-FA can be reduced by increasing Vb1 or increasing positive Vb2. The error rates of writing ‘1’ can be reduced by increasing Vb1 or decreasing negative Vb2. The reduction of the output error rates can be realized effectively by increasing the driving voltage (Vdd).

High-speed flash ADCs are useful in high-speed applications such as communication receivers. Due to offset voltage variation in the sub-micron processes, the power consumption and the area increase significantly to suppress variation. As an alternative to suppressing the variation, we have developed a flash ADC architecture that selects the comparators based on offset voltage ranking for reference generation. Specifically, with the order statistics as a basis, our method selects the minimum number of comparators to obtain equally spaced reference values. Because the proposed ADC utilizes offset voltages as references, no resistor ladder is required. We also developed a time-domain sorting mechanism for the offset voltages to achieve on-chip comparator selection. We first perform a detailed analysis of the order statistics based selection method and then design a 4-bit ADC in a commercial 65-nm process and perform transistor-level simulation. When using 127 comparators, INLs of 20 virtual chips are in the range of -0.34LSB/+0.29LSB to -0.83LSB/+0.74LSB, and DNLs are in the range of -0.33LSB/+0.24LSB to -0.77LSB/+1.18LSB at 1-GS/s operation. Our ADC achieves the SNDR of 20.9dB at Nyquist-frequency input and the power consumption of 0.84mW.

A power-scalable wideband distributed amplifier is proposed. For reducing the power consumption of this power-hungry amplifier, it is efficient to lower the supply voltage. However, there is a hurdle owing to the transistor threshold voltage. In this work, a CMOS deeply depleted channel process is employed to overcome the hurdle.

This brief presents a slope analog-digital converter (ADC)-based supply voltage monitor (SVM) for biofuel-cell-powered supply-sensing systems operating in a supply voltage range of 0.18-0.35V. The proposed SVM is designed to utilize the output of energy harvester extracting power from biological reactions, realizing energy-autonomous sensor interfaces. A burst pulse generator uses a dynamic leakage suppression logic oscillator to generate a stable clock signal under the sub-threshold region for pulse counting. A slope-based voltage-to-time converter is employed to generate a pulse width proportional to the supply voltage with high linearity. The test chip of the proposed SVM is implemented in 180-nm CMOS technology with an active area of 0.018mm2. It consumes 2.1nW at 0.3V and achieves a conversion time of 117-673ms at 0.18-0.35V with a nonlinearity error of -5.5/+8.3mV, achieving an energy-efficient biosensing frontend.

This paper proposes constant voltage design based on K-inverter for cooperative inductive power transfer (IPT) where a nearby receiver picks up power and simultaneously cooperates in relaying the signal toward another distant receiver. In a cooperative IPT system, wireless power is fundamentally transferred to the nearby receiver via one K-inverter and to the distant receiver via two K-inverters. By adding one more K-inverter to the nearby receiver, our design is among the simplest methods as it delivers constant output voltage to each receiver via two K-inverters only. Experimental results verify that the proposed cooperative IPT system can stabilize two output voltages against the load variations while attaining high RF-RF efficiency of 90%.

In response to fast charging systems, Silicon Carbide (SiC) power semiconductor devices are of great interest of the automotive power electronics applications as the next generation of fast charging systems require high voltage batteries. For high voltage battery EVs (Electric Vehicles) over 800V, SiC power semiconductor devices are suitable for 3-phase inverters, battery chargers, and isolated DC-DC converters due to their high voltage rating and high efficiency performance. However, SiC-MOSFETs have two characteristics that interfere with high-speed switching and high efficiency performance operations for SiC MOS-FET applications in automotive power electronics systems. One characteristic is the low voltage rating of the gate-source terminal, and the other is the large internal gate-resistance of SiC MOS-FET. The purpose of this work was to evaluate a proposed hybrid gate drive circuit that could ignore the internal gate-resistance and maintain the gate-source terminal stability of the SiC-MOSFET applications. It has been found that the proposed hybrid gate drive circuit can achieve faster and lower loss switching performance than conventional gate drive circuits by using the current source gate drive characteristics. In addition, the proposed gate drive circuit can use the voltage source gate drive characteristics to protect the gate-source terminals despite the low voltage rating of the SiC MOS-FET gate-source terminals.

Reducing power consumption is a crucial factor making industrial designs, such as mobile SoCs, competitive. Voltage scaling (VS) is the classical yet most effective technique that contributes to quadratic power reduction. A recent design technique called activation-aware slack assignment (ASA) enhances the voltage-scaling by allocating the timing margin of critical paths with a stochastic mean-time-to-failure (MTTF) analysis. Meanwhile, such stochastic treatment of timing errors is accepted in limited application domains, such as image processing. This paper proposes a design optimization methodology that achieves a mode-wise voltage-scalable (MWVS) design guaranteeing no timing errors in each mode operation. This work formulates the MWVS design as an optimization problem that minimizes the overall power consumption considering each mode duration, achievable voltage lowering and accompanied circuit overhead explicitly, and explores the solution space with the downhill simplex algorithm that does not require numerical derivation and frequent objective function evaluations. For obtaining a solution, i.e., a design, in the optimization process, we exploit the multi-corner multi-mode design flow in a commercial tool for performing mode-wise ASA with sets of false paths dedicated to individual modes. We applied the proposed design methodology to RISC-V design. Experimental results show that the proposed methodology saves 13% to 20% more power compared to the conventional VS approach and attains 8% to 15% gain from the conventional single-mode ASA. We also found that cycle-by-cycle fine-grained false path identification reduced leakage power by 31% to 42%.

In the upcoming Internet of Things era, reducing energy consumption of embedded processors is highly desired. Minimum Energy Point Tracking (MEPT) is one of the most efficient methods to reduce both dynamic and static energy consumption of a processor. Previous works proposed a variety of MEPT methods over the past years. However, none of them incorporate their algorithms with practical real-time operating systems, although edge computing applications often require low energy task execution with guaranteeing real-time properties. The difficulty comes from the time complexity for identifying an MEP and changing voltages, which often prevents real-time task scheduling. The conventional Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) only scales the supply voltage. On the other hand, MEPT needs to adjust the body bias voltage in addition. This additional tuning knob makes MEPT much more complicated. This paper proposes an approximate MEPT algorithm, which reduces the complexity of identifying an MEP down to that of DVFS. The key idea is to linearly approximate the relationship between the processor frequency, supply voltage, and body bias voltage. Thanks to the approximation, optimal voltages for a specified clock frequency can be derived immediately. We also propose a task scheduling algorithm, which adjusts processor performance to the workload and then provides a soft real-time capability to the system. The operating system stochastically adjusts the average response time of the processor to be equal to a specified deadline. MEPT will be performed as a general task, and its overhead is considered in the calculation of the frequency. The experiments using a fabricated test chip and on-chip sensors show that the proposed algorithm is a maximum of 16 times more energy-efficient than DVFS. Also, the energy loss induced by the approximation is only 3% at most, and the algorithm does not sacrifice the fundamental real-time properties.