Advances in Ultra-Low-Voltage Design

The idea of exploiting weak-inversion operation for low power, pioneered by Dr. Eric Vittoz in the 1960's, has led to many recent advances in sub-threshold circuit design, described in this paper by MIT's Anantha Chandrakasan and Joyce Kwong. In the near future, exciting new applications such as medical monitoring, toxic gas sensors and next-generation portable video gadgets in a number of systems will be powered by energy scavenging technologies that will require electronic circuits to operate with the utmost energy efficiency.