Technologies for Ultradynamic Voltage Scaling

Energy efficiency of electronic circuits is a critical concern in a wide range of applications from mobile multi-media to biomedical monitoring. An added challenge is that many of these applications have dynamic workloads. To reduce the energy consumption under these variable computation requirements, the underlying circuits must function efficiently over a wide range of supply voltages. This paper presents voltage-scalable circuits such as logic cells, SRAMs, ADCs, and dc-dc converters. Using these circuits as building blocks, two different applications are highlighted. First, we describe an H.264/AVC video decoder that efficiently scales between QCIF and 1080p resolutions, using a supply voltage varying from 0.5 V to 0.85 V. Second, we describe a 0.3 V 16-bit micro-controller with on-chip SRAM, where the supply voltage is generated efficiently by an integrated dc-dc converter.Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)Texas Instruments Incorporated (Texas Instruments Graduate Women’s Fellowship for Leadership in Microelectronics)Intel Corporation (Intel Ph.D. Fellowship Program)Texas Instruments IncorporatedNokia CorporationSemiconductor Research Corporation . Focus Center for Circuit and System Solutions (C2S2)United States. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agenc