Exploring Schmitt Trigger Circuits for Process Variability Mitigation

Process variability has become one of the major factors concerning variations in IC metrics, such as performance and energy consumption, due to the aggressive technology and voltage scaling. This work analyzes the impact on the variability robustness of a Schmitt Trigger-based technique. Several works point out that the considered technique helps to improve the variability robustness at the electrical level. The technique was applied on four Full Adder considering two different Schmitt Triggers designs at the layout level using the 7nm FinFET technology node from ASAP7. Performance, energy, and area are taken into account. Results show, on average, up to 36% and 45% improvement in delay and energy variability robustness, respectively.