Adaptive Supply Voltage Technique for Low Swing Interconnects1

This research was funded in part by Semiconductor Research Corporation under contract (#98-HJ-638) and in part by DARPA. Abstract The increase in power consumption due to interconnects and the variation in delays (delay spread) among long interconnects are becoming important issues for design of high performance and low power circuits in scaled technologies. In this paper we propose an adaptive supply voltage technique for low swing interconnects. The proposed technique assigns different supply voltages to drive interconnects based on their delay. The voltage assignment is done only once during the initialization period of the circuit. Hence, there is no extra power consumption in the active mode. We also show that there is an optimum number of supply voltages required to achieve maximum power saving. Simulation results show that for a set of 64 buses we can achieve 42.8% and 55.9% reductions in the power consumption and delay spread, respectively.