Technologies for ultradynamic voltage scaling

Anantha P. Chandrakasan, Denis C. Daly, Daniel Frederic Finchelstein, Joyce Kwong, Yogesh Kumar Ramadass, Mahmut Ersin Sinangil, Vivienne Sze, Naveen Verma

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

96 Scopus citations

Abstract

Energy efficiency of electronic circuits is a critical concern in a wide range of applications from mobile multimedia to biomedical monitoring. An added challenge is that many of these applications have dynamic workloads. To reduce the energy consumption under these variable computation requirements, the underlying circuits must function efficiently over a wide range of supply voltages. This paper presents voltage-scalable circuits such as logic cells, SRAMs, ADCs, and dcdc converters. Using these circuits as building blocks, two different applications are highlighted. First, we describe an H.264/AVC video decoder that efficiently scales between QCIF and 1080p resolutions, using a supply voltage varying from 0.5 V to 0.85 V. Second, we describe a 0.3 V 16-bit microcontroller with on-chip SRAM, where the supply voltage is generated efficiently by an integrated dcdc converter.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number5395770
Pages (from-to)191-214
Number of pages24
JournalProceedings of the IEEE
Volume98
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 2010
Externally publishedYes

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Keywords

  • Integrated circuits
  • Low power
  • Ultradynamic voltage scaling

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