Ultralow-voltage design and technology of silicon-on-thin-buried-oxide (SOTB) CMOS for highly energy efficient electronics in IoT era

Ultralow-voltage (ULV) operation of CMOS circuits is effective for significantly reducing the power consumption of the circuits. Although operation at the minimum energy point (MEP) is effective, its slow operating speed has been an obstacle. The silicon-on-thin-buried-oxide (SOTB) CMOS is a strong candidate for ultralow-power (ULP) electronics because of its small variability and back-bias control. These advantages of SOTB CMOS enable power and performance optimization with adaptive V_th control at ULV and can achieve ULP operation with acceptably high speed and low leakage. In this paper, we describe our recent results on the ULV operation of the CPU, SRAM, ring oscillator, and, other logic circuits. Our 32-bit RISC CPU chip, named “Perpetuum Mobile,” has a record low energy consumption of 13.4 pJ when operating at 0.35 V and 14 MHz. Perpetuum-Mobile micro-controllers are expected to be a core building block in a huge number of electronic devices in the internet-of-things (IoT) era.