Area-power trade-offs for flexible filtering in green radios

The energy efficiency of wireless infrastructure and terminals has been drawing renewed attention of late, due to their significant environmental cost. Emerging green communication paradigms such as cognitive radios, are also imposing the additional requirement of flexibility. This dual requirement of energy efficiency and flexibility poses new design challenges for implementing radio functional blocks. This paper focuses on the area vs. power trade-offs for the type of channel filters that are required in the digital frontend of a flexible, energy-efficient radio. In traditional CMOS circuits, increased area was traded for reduced dynamic power consumption. With leakage power emerging as the dominant mode of power consumption in nanoscale CMOS, these trade-offs must be revisited due to the strong correlation between area and leakage power. The current work discusses how the increased timing slacks obtained by increasing the parallelism can be exploited for overall power reduction even in nanoscale circuits. In this context the paper introduces the notion of ‘area efficiency’ and a metric for evaluating it. The proposed metric has also been used to compare the area efficiencies of different classes of time-shared filters.