Lower bounds on energy dissipation and noise-tolerance for deep submicron VLSI

In this paper, we obtain the lower bounds on total energy dissipation of deep submicron (DSM) VLSI circuits via an information-theoretic framework. This framework enables the derivation of lower bounds under the constraint of reliable operation in presence of DSM noise. We employ noise-tolerance via coding to approach the lower bounds on energy dissipation. It is shown that the lower bounds on energy for an off-chip I/O signaling example are a factor of 24X below present day systems. It is also shown that reduction in energy consumption by a factor of 4X can be obtained by employing Reed-Muller codes to achieve the desired bit-error-rate (BER) in presence of DSM noise.