Low power design and process technology

Hi everyone,

I have a question about low power design. I found some paper about low power design, they said that the supply voltage is just 0.8V even 0.6V. I wonder how they can do it? And does the low power design depend on process technology?

I think many guys in our forum designed low power IC. Please help me, thank!

Decreasing supply voltage - called voltage scaling - is a common technique to reduce power consumption. With the clock frequencies increasing continuously in modern chips, voltage scaling is a plausible option to negate the effect of high frequencies on (dynamic) power consumption. Voltage scaling is also useful in maintaining constant local electric fields in transistors which otherwise can increase rapidly due to shrinking sizes (decreasing channel length).

So yes, as far as the voltage scaling aspect of low power design is concerned, it depends on the process technology: you have to see your channel size before deciding on the supply voltage. Also, voltage scaling is limited by the value of the threshold voltage which is again process technology dependent.

I hope this helps :)