A 1 mW low power SoC for a mm3-sized microrobot

This paper is focused on the power features of a ultra-low power SoC for 3 times 3 times 3 mm³ microrobot. The SoC is based on the 8051 microcontroller and fabricated with a 0.13 mum ultra-low leakage CMOS process of STMicroelectronics. Because of the very restrictively power constraints, less than 1 mW, we have added a Power Management Unit (PMU) and a programmable clock generator to allow Dynamic Frequency Scaling (DFS). Leakage and analog static currents consume 700 muW leaving only 300 muW for robot driving and data processing. The static power has been improved by adding switch off transistors so the SoC can obtain more dynamic power by switching on/off different modules as a function of the task to execute.