Design of near-threshold microcontroller for wireless sensing applications

Author

Wei-Xiang Tang ; Keng-Yu Lin ; Po-Han Haung

Author_Institution

Dept. of Embedded Syst. Hardware Technol., Ind. Technol. Res. Inst., Hsinchu, Taiwan

fYear

2015

fDate

27-29 April 2015

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

4

Abstract

This paper reveals an in-house microcontroller, BLAZE, running at 1MHz and 0.4V. In order to deploy BLAZE under strict environments, an on-chip distributed voltage compensator is proposed. With these compensators whose layout size are similar to standard DECAP cell, the voltage stability improves more than 20.3% compared to DECAP cells. To reduce the extra power source and level-shifter a single voltage IO cell is proposed with less than 28% performance degradation. BLAZE is also evaluated for wireless sensing applications, and the results show that BLAZE is more suitable to work under near-threshold regime than race-to-sleep.

Keywords

microcontrollers; BLAZE; DECAP cells; in-house microcontroller; near-threshold microcontroller; on-chip distributed voltage compensator; wireless sensing applications; Microcontrollers; Power demand; Sensors; Sparks; Threshold voltage; Wireless communication; Wireless sensor networks; Near-threshold regime; on-chip distributed voltage compensator; single-voltage IO cell;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

VLSI Design, Automation and Test (VLSI-DAT), 2015 International Symposium on

Conference_Location

Hsinchu

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/VLSI-DAT.2015.7114497

Filename

7114497