Process Variation Reduction for CMOS Logic Operating at Sub-threshold Supply Voltage

Sub-threshold circuit design has become a popular approach for building energy efficient digital circuits. The main drawbacks are performance degradation due to the exponentially reduced driving current, and the effect of increased sensitivity to process variation. To obtain energy savings while reducing performance degradation, we propose the design of a robust sub-threshold library and post-silicon tuning using an adaptive fuzzy logic controller which performs body bias scaling. We show that our methodology is able to fix the performance, consequently, making the system more energy efficient and achieving maximum yield.

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