Leakage power reduction for deeply-scaled FinFET circuits operating in multiple voltage regimes using fine-grained gate-length biasing technique

With the aggressive downscaling of the process technologies and importance of battery-powered systems, reducing leakage power consumption has become one of the most crucial design challenges for IC designers. This paper presents a device-circuit cross-layer framework to utilize fine-grained gate-length biased FinFETs for circuit leakage power reduction in the near- and super-threshold operation regimes. The impacts of Gate-Length Biasing (GLB) on circuit speed and leakage power are first studied using one of the most advanced technology nodes - a 7nm FinFET technology. Then multiple standard cell libraries using different leakage reduction techniques, such as GLB and Dual-V
_T
, are built in multiple operating regimes at this technology node. It is demonstrated that, compared to Dual-V
_T
, GLB is a more suitable technique for the advanced 7nm FinFET technology due to its capability of delivering a finer-grained trade-off between the leakage power and circuit speed, not to mention the lower manufacturing cost. The circuit synthesis results of a variety of ISCAS benchmark circuits using the presented GLB 7nm FinFET cell libraries show up to 70% leakage improvement with zero degradation in circuit speed in the near- and super-threshold regimes, respectively, compared to the standard 7nm FinFET cell library.