Design of near-threshold microcontroller for wireless sensing applications

This paper reveals an in-house microcontroller, BLAZE, running at 1MHz and 0.4V. In order to deploy BLAZE under strict environments, an on-chip distributed voltage compensator is proposed. With these compensators whose layout size are similar to standard DECAP cell, the voltage stability improves more than 20.3% compared to DECAP cells. To reduce the extra power source and level-shifter a single voltage IO cell is proposed with less than 28% performance degradation. BLAZE is also evaluated for wireless sensing applications, and the results show that BLAZE is more suitable to work under near-threshold regime than race-to-sleep.