ZZ-HVS: Zig-zag horizontal and vertical sleep transistor sharing to reduce leakage power in on-chip SRAM peripheral circuits

Based on Recent studies peripheral circuit (including decoders, wordline drivers, input and output drivers) constitutes a large portion of the cache leakage. In addition as technology migrate to smaller geometries, leakage contribution to total power consumption increases faster than dynamic power, promoting leakage as the largest power consumption factor. This paper proposes zig-zag share, a circuit technique to reduce leakage in SRAM peripheral. Using architectural control of zig-zag share, an integrated technique called Sleep-Share is proposed and applied in L1 and L2 caches. The results show leakage reduction by up to 40X in deeply pipelined SRAM peripheral circuits, with only a 4% area overhead and small additional delay.