Low power solution for wireless applications

Low standby power dissipation is the primary need for most of the wireless applications for prolonged battery life. Traditionally ASIC solutions currently address either high density or high performance requirements and to some extent power to cater to the needs of a variety of customers. The solution needs to be improved further for the power considerations specifically. This paper describes how the ASIC solution for high density can be tuned to get a low power library. The strategy involves changing the length of all the mosfets in all the core cells in the library. This solution decreases the leakage power by at least 3X. This paper also describes about the performance and area impact of the low power library compared to the high density library. Unlike the other approaches such as multi Vt, this approach is very cost effective since it neither involves any changes in the fabrication process nor does it require extra masks and hence this is the most suitable and quick solution for the wireless applications