Near-threshold operations provide a powerful knob for improving energy efficiency and alleviating on-chip power densities. This article explores the impact of newest FinFET CMOS technologies (from 40 to 7 nm) on near-threshold computing in terms of …
On-chip supply boosting can quickly restore a microprocessor core's power rail from near-threshold to super-threshold when critical code sections are encountered. We demonstrate a flip-chip implementation of a supply boosting technique, called …
A reconfigurable self-timed regenerator based global interconnect scheme enables graceful degradation of performance and power in wide range dynamic voltage/frequency scaled systems. A test chip demonstrates up to 40% and 25% better performance …
A switched-capacitor voltage regulator (SCVR) that dithers flying capacitance (C$_textrmFLY$) to reduce output ripple is presented. The proposed technique is implemented in a 40-phase SCVR with 4b C$_textrmFLY$ modulation in 65nm CMOS. At 2.3V input, …
This work presents an area-efficient and variation-tolerant small-signal differential sensing (VTS) scheme that modifies the conventional SA circuit to include: 1) a structure for on-the-fly, auto-zeroing offset compensation, 2) pre-amplification of …
Visual monitoring with CMOS image sensors opens up a variety of new applications for wireless sensor nodes, ranging from military surveillance to in vivo molecular imaging. In particular, the ability to detect motion can enable more intelligent power …
A true random number generator (tRNG) is proposed that, for the first time, uses the random physical process of time to oxide breakdown under voltage stress. Time to breakdown is repeatedly measured with a counter and serialized into a bitstream. The …
We present ultra low power silicon photonic transceivers, including a 320 fJ/bit reverse biased ring modulator integrated with CMOS driver, and a 690 fJ/bit record-low power receiver with sensitivity of -18.9 dBm at 5 Gbps for bit-error-rate of …
Flexible, stress-engineered spring interconnects are a novel technology potentially enabling room temperature assembly approaches to building highly integrated and multi-chip modules (MCMs). Such interconnects are an essential solder-free technology …
Recent advances in silicon photonics bring significant benefits to "macrochip" grids made of arrayed chips. Such configurations have global interconnects long enough to benefit from the high speed, low energy, and high bandwidth density of optics. In …