Ground bouncing noise suppression techniques for MTCMOS circuits

Ground bouncing noise produced during the sleep to active mode transitions is an important challenge in multithreshold CMOS (MTCMOS) circuits. The effectiveness of different noise-aware MTCMOS circuit techniques to deal with the ground bouncing noise phenomenon is evaluated in this paper. An intermediate relaxation mode is investigated to gradually dump the charge stored on the virtual ground line to the real ground distribution network during the sleep to active mode transitions. The peak amplitude of the ground bouncing noise is reduced by up to 69.17% with the noise-aware MTCMOS circuits without sacrificing the savings in leakage power consumption as compared to the standard MTCMOS circuits in a 90 nm CMOS technology.