Opportunities and challenges: Ultra-low voltage digital IC design techniques

Ultra-low voltage digital IC design is promising in achieving ultra-low power consumption for emerging applications such as IoT, smart sensor and wearable computing. This paper discusses the opportunities and challenges of ultra-low voltage digital IC design by reviewing and discussing the major design techniques for enabling ultra-low voltage operation, including ultra-low voltage device sizing, ultra-low voltage level shifter design, ultra-low voltage SRAM design and variation-resilient techniques for ultra-low voltage design.