An Efficient Control Point Insertion Technique for Leakage Reduction of Scaled CMOS Circuits

Leakage power reduction is extremely important in the design of scaled CMOS logic circuits. The dominant leakage components of such circuits are the subthreshold leakage and the thin-oxide gate leakage. This paper describes an efficient leakage reduction method that considers both these components, and is based on the selective insertion of control points. The selection is based on the leakage reduction potential and the delay insensitivity of the candidate gates. Simulations on the ISCAS85 benchmark circuits show that this method results in leakage reduction with no speed degradation when control points are added to 93% of the gates compared to the leakage of the baseline circuit whose inputs have been subjected to the minimum leakage vector.