Stretching the limit of microarchitectural level leakage control with Adaptive Light-Weight Vth Hopping

Power gating (PG) and body biasing (BB) are popular leakage control techniques at microarchitectural level. However, their large overhead prevents them from being applied for active leakage reduction. The overhead problem is further magnified by temperature and process variation, leading to the “corner case leakage control” problem. This paper presents an Adaptive Light-Weight Vth Hopping technique. This technique dramatically reduces the overhead for mode transition, addresses the corner case leakage control problem, and thus enables active leakage control.