Nathaniel Pinckney and David Money

Techniques to Improve Energy Efficiency

nergy-efficient near-threshold design has been proposed to increase energy efficiency across a wide range of applications. This article first provides a background motivating near-threshold and how it differs from super-threshold and subthreshold operation. Next, state-of-the-art near-threshold techniques are summarized that help overcome barriers to near-threshold adoption, namely high variati...

CMOS Visual Motion Sensor with Temporal Averaging and Pixel Aggregation

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 management through on-demand duty cycling and reduced data-retention requirements. Conventional imager designs focus on achieving higher resolutio...

Reevaluating Fast Dual-Voltage Power Rail Switching Circuitry

Several recent papers have been published proposing the use of dual-voltage rails and fast switching circuitry to address bottlenecks or overcome process variation in nearthreshold computing systems. The published results yield boosting transition times of 7-10ns, which, in some cases, is needed for the architectural contributions to be justified. However, the analysis of these circuits assumed...

Parallelized Booth-Encoded Radix-4 Montgomery Multipliers

This paper proposes two parallelized radix-4 scalable Montgomery multiplier implementations. The designs do not require precomputed hard multiples of the operands, but instead uses Booth encoding to compute products. The designs use a novel method for propagating the sign bits for negative partial products. The first design right shifts operands to reduce critical path length when using Booth e...

Theodor Billroth and his musical life.