Effectiveness of adaptive supply voltage and body bias for reducing impact of parameter variations in low power and high performance microprocessors

Abstract

Adaptive supply voltage as well as adaptive body bias may be used to control the frequency and leakage distribution of fabricated microprocessor dies. Test chip measurements show that adaptive V/sub CC/ is effective in reducing the impact of parameter variations on frequency, active power, and leakage power of microprocessors when 20 mV V/sub CC/ resolution is used. Using adaptive V/sub CC/ together with adaptive V/sub BS/ or within-die body bias is much more effective than using any of them individually.