Reducing power in flexible a-Si digital circuits while preserving state

Amorphous silicon (a-Si) thin-film circuits promise robust, lightweight, flexible displays and digital computation. Here, several methods for reducing standby-power while retaining logic state are investigated for such circuits. Lacking a PMOS load transistor, the conventional approach for retaining state is to dynamically shift values through memory elements. We investigate other methods and demonstrate 36× power savings by introducing a nonshifting, refresh based operating mode.