Design & Reuse

Adaptive Power/Performance Management for FD-SOI

semiwiki.com, Apr. 21, 2021 – 

A vexing chip design issue is how to achieve (or improve) performance and power dissipation targets, allowing for a wide range of manufacturing process variation (P) and dynamic operation voltage and temperature fluctuations (VT). One design method is to analyze the operation across a set of PVT corners, and ensure sufficient design margin across this multi-dimensional space. Another approach is to dynamically alter the applied voltages (globally, or in a local domain), based on sensing the changing behavior of a reference circuit.

The introduction of fully-depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI) device technology has led to a resurgence in the opportunities for incorporating circuitry to adaptively modify the device bias conditions, to compensate for PVT tolerances. This interest is further advanced by the goals of many applications to operate over a wider temperature range, and especially, to operate at a reduced VDD supply voltage to minimize power dissipation.

At the recent International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC 2021), as part of a collaboration with GLOBALFOUNDRIES and CEA-Leti, Dolphin Design presented an update on their IP offering to provide adaptive body bias (ABB) to FD-SOI devices to compensate for PVT variation and optimize power/performance, with minimal overhead. This article provides some of the highlights of their presentation.

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