Energy-Aware Digital Circuits Design

The main goal of digital circuits design in the past was to achieve the fastest architecture, able to run at hundreds, even thousands of MHz’s. Over the years technology scaling has played an important role, but there is a price to be paid, increasing the number of transistors in a chip increase also its power consumption. Designs in deep sub-micron process, e.g. 45nm and below designs are limited by the amount of power they can consume; this means we cannot longer design digital circuits only for performance. Furthermore, ultra low-energy applications in consumer electronics domain are becoming increasingly important. Now we are facing a new challenge, design digital circuits in an energy-aware manner. In our group we are exploring transistor level and architecture optimizations that allow the digital circuits to achieve the best possible energy efficiency in all context of operation, which is the primary goal of Energy-Aware design.