Ultra-Low-Voltage Design of Nanometer CMOS Circuits for Smart Energy-Autonomous Systems

Abstract — Energy-autonomous systems (EAS) are small elec-tronic devices performing light tasks such as data acquisition, processing, storing and communication without the connection to a power grid. EAS thus require ultra-low power consumption while being powered by tiny batteries and/or harvesting energy from their environments. Current EAS applications feature pas-sive RFID tags, biomedical devices and basic sensor networks. The pervasive vision of a world where human beings are surrounded by ambient intelligence implies the deployment of a swarm of un-thethered devices. To support this vision, there is a crucial need to significantly enhance the comput-ing capability of existing EAS with rich signal processing, data encryption/decryption and error-tolerant communications, leading to so-called “smart EAS”. This can only be achieved in a cost-effective way by using the most advanced nanomete