Building temperature-insensitive nanoscale CMOS circuits with adaptive voltage power supplies

Abstract

Temperature variations caused by heat generation and dissipation can have significant performance implications on nanoscale CMOS logic circuits. In this paper, we show that such temperature-induced delay variations can be well controlled or even reduced by dynamically adjusting the voltage level of power supplies over a relatively small range. We thus propose a self-adaptive, temperature-aware voltage power supply circuit that can be applied to power individual logic gates or subsystems. One distinct advantage of using the proposed power supply circuit is that high-precision temperature sensors are no longer needed for voltage regulation. Experiments on various benchmark circuits, which are implemented with a 45nm CMOS technology, have shown that they experience 10% ∼ 20% delay variation if they are powered by an adaptive voltage source as proposed over a wide temperature range from 0°C to 90°C. This is a sharp contrast to over 50% delay variation observed in most IC designs where a constant power supply is employed.