An Approach for Reducing Leakage Current Variation due to Manufacturing Variability

Abstract

Leakage current is an important qualitative metric of LSI (Large Scale Integrated circuit). In this paper, we focus on reduction of leakage current variation under the process variation. Firstly, we derive a set of quadratic equations to evaluate delay and leakage current under the process variation. Using these equations, we discuss the cases of varying leakage current without degrading delay distribution and propose a procedure to reduce the leakage current variations. From the experiments, we show the proposed method effectively reduces the leakage current variation up to 50% at 90 percentile point of the distribution compared with the conventional design approach.