Leakage power considerations in actively running blocks

Leakage power reductions in active circuits have attracted researcher´s attention for the last few years because of expectations of higher share of leakage power in total power consumption for downsized technologies. It was expected that leakage power will even overcome dynamic power consumption in submicron technologies. However, large portions of the research conducted for actively running processors has overseen two important factors of the design, the frequency of operation and the activity rate. It is shown that these must be investigated before starting to worry about leakage in actively running blocks. In fact, leakage energy constitutes less than 1% of total energy consumption in actively running parts.