Aggressive Leakage Management in ARM Based Systems

The management of power consumption for battery life is widely considered to be the limiting factor in supporting the concurrent operation of high performance, complex applications on mobile platforms. At 65nm and below, minimizing the static power dissipation through aggressive techniques such as coarse grain MTCMOS power gating and threshold voltage scaling can yield these significant reductions in power consumption that are necessary. ARM and Synopsys have jointly developed a comprehensive low power technology demonstrator that employs these advanced low power techniques. Various alternative approaches to MTCMOS power gating and threshold voltage scaling are discussed together with a detailed description of the implementation flow and the results.