期刊
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS I-REGULAR PAPERS
卷 60, 期 2, 页码 290-302出版社
IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC
DOI: 10.1109/TCSI.2012.2215785
关键词
Low power electronics; micromechanical devices; nanoelectromechanical systems
资金
- National Science Foundation [0747262]
- Direct For Computer & Info Scie & Enginr
- Division of Computing and Communication Foundations [0747262] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
In order to combat the exponentially growing leakage power in modern microprocessors, researchers have proposed the use of alternative power-gating structures that can yield higher leakage savings with a much lower performance impact. A prime contender is an emerging CMOS-compatible power-gating device, the nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS) switch. Compared to transistors, NEMS switches have zero off-state leakage, so for very long periods of sleep, their effectiveness is unparalleled. For systems with periods of faster on/off rates, however, their slower switching speed, high activation energy, and finite device lifetime become drawbacks. This motivates an exploration to determine whether NEMS switches are capable of fast, fine-grained power-gating. In this article, we provide an accurate energy model of functional-unit power-gating that allows us to effectively compare transistors and NEMS switches. It is also fast enough to support the optimization of a wide variety of circuit-and system-level parameters, including supply voltage, threshold voltage, and power-gating scheduler aggressiveness. Using this framework, we show that NEMS switch power-gates along with an ideal oracle power-gating policy can achieve an average 29.5% drop in total functional unit energy, compared to only 23.5% with transistor power-gates. A more realistic hardware-based policy for NEMS switches yields a 28.9% drop, compared to a 23.0% drop with transistors.
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