Essentials of Low Power Design Methodologies

Catalog description

This introductory course covers the basic design of low-power circuitry in deep submicron technologies. The course also deals with the impact of soft errors in VLSI and introduces the reliability issues of low power designs. Topics studied include leakage power, short channel effects and basic leakage mechanisms such as sub-threshold and gate leakage, leakage minimization techniques such as transistor stacking, basic interconnect design, Synopsys HSpice simulation tool introduction, soft errors in advanced computer systems, error mechanisms, error rate, basic mitigation methodologies and impact of power optimizations on chip reliability.