Impact of technology scaling on leakage power in nano-scale bulk CMOS digital standard cells

Abstract

Leakage estimation is an important step in nano-scale technology digital design flows. While reliable data exist on leakage trends with bulk CMOS technology scaling in stand-alone devices and circuits, there is a lack of public domain results on the effect of scaling on leakage power consumption for a complete standard cell set. We present an analysis on a standard cell library applying a logic-level estimation model, supported by SPICE BSIM4 comparison. The logic-level model speedup over SPICE is >103 with average accuracy below 1% error. We therefore explore the effects of scaling on the whole standard cell set with respect to different leakage mechanisms (sub-threshold, body, gate) and to input pattern dependence. While body leakage appears to be dominant, sub-threshold leakage is expected to increase more than other components with scaling. Detailed data of the whole analysis are reported for use in further research on leakage aware digital design.