High-performance, low-power, and leakage-tolerance challenges for sub-70nm microprocessor circuits

CMOS technology scaling is becoming difficult beyond 70nm node, raising new design challenges for high-performance and low-power microprocessors. This paper discusses some of the key paradigm shifts required. Circuit techniques to combat (i) increasing switching and leakage power dissipation, (ii) poor leakage tolerance of large-signal cache arrays and register files, (iii) worsening global on-chip interconnect scaling trend, and (iv) high-performance robust datapath circuits enabling up to 10GHz ALU and instruction scheduler loops in 130nm dual-Vt CMOS technology are described.