leakage in cmos
The high leakage current in nano-meter regimes is becoming a significant contributor to power dissipation of CMOS circuits as threshold voltage, channel length, and gate oxide thickness are reduced. Consequently, the identification of different leakage components is very important for estimation and reduction of leakage. Moreover, the increasing statistical variation in the process parameters has emerged as a serious problem in the nano-scaled circuit design and can cause significant variation in the transistor leakage current across and within different dies. Designing with the worst case leakage may cause excessive guard-banding, resulting in a lower performance. This paper explores various intrinsic leakage mechanisms including weak inversion, gate-oxide tunneling and junction leakage etc. Various circuit level techniques to reduce leakage energy and their design trade-off is discussed. We also explore process variation compensating techniques to reduce delay and leakage spread, while meeting power constraint and yield.