Adaptive Power Management for Nanoscale SoC Design

The demand for power sensitive designs in system-on-chip (SoC) has grown significantly as MOSFET transistors scale down. Since portable battery powered devices such as cell phones, PDA’s, and portable computers are becoming more complex and prevalent, the demand for increased battery life will require designers to seek out new technologies and circuit techniques to maintain high performance and long operational lifetimes. As process dimensions shrink further toward nanometer technology, traditional methods of dynamic power reduction are becoming less effective due to the increased impact of standby power. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel adaptive power management system for nanoscale SoC design that reduces standby power dissipation. The proposed design method reduces the leakage power at least by 500 times for ISCAS’85 benchmark circuits designed using 32-nm CMOS technology comparing to the case where the method is not applied.