Techniques for aggressive supply voltage scaling and efficient regulation

Aggressive voltage scaling to 1V and below through technology, circuit, and architecture optimization is the key to low-power design. Threshold voltage scaling enables aggressive supply scaling but increases leakage power. Technology and circuit trends to control idle leakage power are presented including MTCMOS, variable V-T bulk-CMOS, and variable V-T SOI. Power can also be reduced by adaptively varying the supply voltage in applications where the computational workload varies with time. Aggressive voltage and power level scaling requires efficient DC-DC conversion circuitry and in some cases. it is necessary to embed this function in the processor.