The use of dual threshold voltages can significantly reduce the static power dissipated in CMOS VLSI circuits. With the supply voltage at 1 V and threshold voltage as low as 0.2 V the subthreshold leakage power of transistors starts dominating the dynamic power. Also, many times a large number of devices spend a long time in a standby mode where the leakage power is the only source of power consumption. We present a near-optimal approach to synthesize low static power CMOS VLSI circuits with two threshold voltages that reduces power consumption compared with a previous approach by up to 29.45%. Also, presented is a technique which finds static power optimal configurations for CMOS VLSI circuits when an arbitrary number of threshold voltages are allowed.
['Vijay Sundararajan', 'Keshab K. Parhi']
Low power synthesis of dual threshold voltage CMOS VLSI circuits