Leakage current: Moore´s law meets static power

Off-state leakage is static power, current that leaks through transistors even when they are turned off. The other source of power dissipation in today´s microprocessors, dynamic power, arises from the repeated capacitance charge and discharge on the output of the hundreds of millions of gates in today´s chips. Until recently, only dynamic power has been a significant source of power consumption, and Moore´s law helped control it. However, power consumption has now become a primary microprocessor design constraint; one that researchers in both industry and academia will struggle to overcome in the next few years. Microprocessor design has traditionally focused on dynamic power consumption as a limiting factor in system integration. As feature sizes shrink below 0.1 micron, static power is posing new low-power design challenges.