Automated selective multi-threshold design for ultra-low standby applications

This paper describes an automated design technique to selectively use multi-threshold CMOS (MTCMOS) in a cell-by-cell fashion. MT cells consisting of low-Vth transistors and high-Vth sleep transistors are assigned to critical paths, while high-Vth cells are assigned to non-critical paths. Compared to the conventional MTCMOS, the gate delay is not affected by the discharge patterns of other gates because there is no virtual ground to be shared. We applied this technique to a test chip of a DSP core. The worst path-delay was improved by 14% over the single high-Vth design without increasing standby leakage at 10% area overhead.