In this paper we consider the problem of proving lower bounds for the permanent. An ongoing line of research has shown super-polynomial lower bounds for slightly-non-uniform small-depth threshold and arithmetic circuits [All99, KP09, JS11, JS12]. We prove a new parameterized lower bound that includes each of the previous results as sub-cases. Our main result implies that the permanent does not ...

Increased downscaling of CMOS circuits with respect to feature size and threshold voltage has a result of dramatically increasing in leakage current. So, leakage power reduction is an important design issue for active and standby modes as long as the technology scaling increased. In this paper, a simultaneous active and standby energy optimization methodology is proposed for 22 nm sub-threshold...

Digital circuits operating in the sub-threshold regime are able to perform minimum energy operation at a given delay. In the sub-threshold regime the circuit delay, and hence, the leakage energy consumption depend on the supply voltage exponentially. By reducing the idle time of the circuit, the energy-minimum supply voltage can be reduced, resulting in lower energy consumption. This paper firs...

Neuromorphic engineering [Mead, 1989, Mead, 1990, Douglas et al., 1995] applies the computational principles used by biological nervous systems to those tasks that biological systems perform easily, but which have proved difficult to do using traditional engineering techniques. These problems include visual and auditory perceptive processing, navigation, and locomotion. Typically, current neuro...

Scaling of single-gate MOSFET faces great challenges in the nanometer regime due to the severe shortchannel effects that cause an exponential increase in the sub-threshold and gate-oxide leakage currents. Double-gate FinFET technology mitigates these limitations by the excellent control over a thin silicon body by two electrically coupled gates. In this paper a variable threshold voltage keeper...

This paper presents a new very low-power, low-voltage successive approximation analog to digital converter (SAR ADC) design based on supply boosting technique. The supply boosting technique (SBT) and supply boosted (SB) circuits including level shifter, comparator, and supporting electronics are described. Supply boosting provides wide input common mode range and sub-1 Volt operation for the ci...

We examine the power of constant depth circuits with sigmoid (i.e. smooth) threshold gates for computing boolean functions. It is shown that, for depth 2, constant size circuits of this type are strictly more powerful than constant size boolean threshold circuits (i.e. circuits with boolean threshold gates). On the other hand it turns out that, for any constant depth d , polynomial size sigmoid...