Low power design using dual threshold voltage

Abstract

We study the reduction of static power consumption by dual threshold voltage assignment. Our goal is, under given timing constraint, to select a maximum number of gates working at high-Vth such that the total power gain is maximized. We propose a maximum independent set based slack assignment algorithm to select gates for high-Vth. The results show that our assignment algorithm can achieve about 68% improvement as compared to results without using dual Vth.