A practical, low-overhead, one-cycle correction design method for variation-tolerant digital circuits

Abstract

This paper presents a practical, low-overhead, one-cycle correction better-than-worst-case design method for ultra-low voltage digital circuits. Excessive design margin for PVT variation brought by traditional worst-case design method is eliminated. Proposed method is completely compatible with EDA tools. Considerable design efforts are relaxed compared with other variation-tolerant techniques. We have implemented our proposed technique on a 16bits x 16bits pipelined multiplier in SIMC 55nm CMOS process. The experimental results show that our proposed technique can get about 59% energy efficiency improvements compared with operating in worst-case timing margin.