Hailong Jiao and Volkan Kursun
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Ground bouncing noise produced during the reactivation events is an exacerbating challenge to maintain accurate logic levels in Multi-threshold CMOS (MTCMOS) circuits. Two noise-aware MTCMOS circuits with a novel dynamic forward body bias technique are proposed in this paper to minimize the ground bouncing noise with smaller sleep transistors. The dynamic-forward-body-biased MTCMOS circuits lower the peak ground bouncing noise by up to 27.76% while reducing the size of the additional sleep transistors by up to 85.71% as compared to the previously published noise-aware MTCMOS techniques with standard zero-body-biased high threshold voltage sleep transistors. The design tradeoffs between the ground bouncing noise and the leakage power consumption in different MTCMOS circuits are evaluated with a UMC 90nm CMOS technology.