This paper presents a low-power and low-voltage 64-kb 8T three-port image memory using 28-nm FD-SOI process technology. Our proposed SRAM accommodates eight-transistor bit cells comprising one-write/two-read ports and a majority logic circuit to save active energy. The test chip operates at a supply voltage of 0.46V and access time of 140ns. The minimum energy point is a supply voltage of 0.54V and an access time of 55ns (= 18.2MHz), at which 484fJ/cycle in a write operation and 650fJ/cycle in a read operation are achieved assisted by majority logic. These factors are 69% and 47% smaller than those in a conventional 6T SRAM using the 28-nm FD-SOI process technology.

In this paper, the Multi-voltage (multi-Vdd) variable pipeline router is proposed to reduce the power consumption of Network-on-Chips (NoCs) designed for Chip Multi-processors (CMPs). The multi-Vdd variable pipeline router adjusts its pipeline depth (i.e., communication latency) and supply voltage level in response to the applied workload. Unlike Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) routers, the operating frequency remains the same for all routers throughout the CMP; thus, omitting the need to synchronize neighboring routers working at different frequencies. Two types of router architectures are presented: a Coarse-Grained Variable Pipeline (CG-VP) router that changes the voltage supplied to the entire router, and a Fine-Grained Variable Pipeline (FG-VP) router that uses a finer power partition. The evaluation results showed that the CG-VP and FG-VP routers achieve a 22.9% and 35.3% power reduction on average with 14% and 23% area overhead in comparison with a baseline router without variable pipelines, respectively. Thanks to the adopted look-ahead mechanism to switch the supply voltage, the performance overhead is only 4.4%.

Dynamic Voltage/Frequency Scaling (DVFS) allows designers to improve energy efficiency through adjusting supply voltage at runtime in order to meet the workload demand. Previous works solving real-time DVFS problems often refer to the canonical schedules with the exponential length. Other solutions for online scheduling depend on empirical or stochastic heuristics, which potentially result in frequent fluctuations of voltage/speed scaling. This paper aims at increasing the schedule predictability using period transformation in the pinwheel task model and improves the control on power-awareness by decreasing the speeds of as many tasks as possible to the same level. Experimental results show the maximum energy savings of 6% over the recent Dynamic Power Management (DPM) method and 12% over other slack reclamation algorithms.

Fine-grained power gating (FGPG) is a power-saving technique by switching off circuit blocks while the blocks are idle. Although FGPG can reduce power consumption without compromising computational performance, switching the power supply on and off causes energy overhead. To prevent power increase caused by the energy overhead, in our prior research we proposed an FGPG control method of the operating system(OS) based on pre-analyzing applications' power usage. However, modern computing systems have a wide variety of use cases and run many types of application; this makes it difficult to analyze the behavior of all these applications in advance. This paper therefore proposes a new FGPG control method without profiling application programs in advance. In the new proposed method, the OS monitors a circuit's idle interval periodically while application programs are running. The OS enables FGPG only if the interval time is long enough to reduce the power consumption. The experimental results in this paper show that the proposed method reduces power consumption by 9.8% on average and up to 17.2% at 25°C. The results also show that the proposed method achieves almost the same power-saving efficiency as the previous profile-based method.

In the most recent processor designs, memory access latency is shortened by adopting a memory hierarchy. In this configuration, the memory consists of a main memory, which comprises dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), and a cache memory, which consists of static random-access memory (SRAM). A cache memory, which is now used in increasingly large volumes, accounts for a vast proportion of the energy consumption of the overall processor. There are two ways to reduce the energy consumption of the cache memory: by decreasing the number of accesses, and by minimizing the energy consumed per access. In this study, we reduce the size of the L1 cache by compressing frequent bit sequences, thus cutting the energy consumed per access. A “frequent bit sequence” is a specific bit pattern that often appears in high-order bits of data retained in the cache memory. Our proposed mechanism, which is based on measurements using a software simulator, cuts energy consumption by 41.0% on average as compared with conventional mechanisms.

A simple approach is presented for designing an antipodal Vivaldi antenna in this paper. A new and better estimation of the low frequency end of the operational range is shown. Final dimensions of the antenna parameters are determined by using the High Frequency Structure Simulator (HFSS). The proposed antenna has a simple configuration but exhibits low return loss, good radiation characteristics, and high and flat gain in the operating ultra wideband frequency range (3.1-10.6 GHz). Lastly, the fabrication has been done along with the specification to confirm the properties by measurements.

Side channel attacks (SCAs) on security devices have become a major concern for system security. Existing SCA countermeasures are costly in terms of area and power consumption. This paper presents a novel differential power analysis (DPA) countermeasure referred to as short-time three-phase single-rail precharge logic (STSPL). The proposed logic is based on a single-rail three-phase operation scheme providing effective DPA-resistance with low cost. In the scheme, a controller is inserted to discharge logic gates by reusing evaluation paths to achieve more balanced power consumption. This reduces the latency between different phases, increasing the difficult of the adversary to conduct DPA, compared with the state-of-the-art DPA-resistance logics. To verify the chip's power consumption in practice, a 4-bit ripple carry adder and a 4-bit inverter of AES-SBOX were implemented. The testing and simulation results of DPA attacks prove the security and efficiency of the proposed logic.

This paper proposes an opamp-free solution to implement single-phase-clock controlled noise shaping in a SAR ADC. Unlike a conventional noise shaping SAR ADC, the proposal realizes noise shaping by charge redistribution, which is a passive technique. The passive implementation has high power efficiency. Meanwhile, since the proposal maintains the basic architecture and operation method of a traditional SAR ADC, it retains all the advantages of a SAR ADC. Furthermore, noise shaping helps to improve the performance of SAR ADC and relaxes its non-ideal effects. Designed in a 65-nm CMOS technology, the prototype realizes 58-dB SNDR based on an 8-bit C-DAC at 50-MS/s sampling frequency. It consumes 120.7-µW power from a 0.8-V supply and achieves a FoM of 14.8-fJ per conversion step.

With the decrease in transistor feature size, power consumption, especially leakage power, has become a most important design concern. Because of their superior electrical properties and design flexibility, fin-type field-effect transistors (FinFETs) seem to be the most promising option in low-power applications. In order to support the VLSI digital system design flow based on logic synthesis, this paper proposes a design method for low-power high-performance standard cells based on IG-mode FinFETs. Such a method is derived on the basis of appropriately and artfully designing and optimizing the stacked structures in each standard cell, and applying the mixed forward and reverse back-gate bias technique in a well-chosen manner. The proposed method is also applicable when the supply voltage reduces to 0.5V to further reduce the leakage power consumption. By applying this design method, optimized IG-mode FinFET standard cells are generated, and they form a low-power high-performance standard cell library. Simulation results of the library cells indicate that the performance of the standard cells designed with the proposed method can be maintained while reducing leakage consumption by a factor of 58.9 at most. The 16-bit ripple carry adder implemented with this library can acquire up to 17.5% leakage power reduction.