Tutorial: Ultra Low-Power and Low-Voltage Digital-Circuit Design Techniques

“Until some 15 years ago there was no attention for low-power CMOS design, due to the ‘C’omplementary nature of logic gates. Despite this beautiful property power dissipation has become the limiting factor in many fields of CMOS design, from high-performance computing to wireless autonomous transducer systems (wireless sensor nodes). In this tutorial an overview will be given of low-power and low-voltage digital circuit design techniques with a focus on truly energy-limited systems, such as wireless sensor nodes. Circuit techniques for super-threshold toward sub-threshold, impact on speed, area, and power, and consequently on architectures will be highlighted.”