This book focuses on increasing the energy-efficiency of electronic devices so that portable applications can have a longer stand-alone time on the same battery. The authors explain the energy-efficiency benefits that ultra-low-voltage circuits provide and provide answers to tackle the challenges which ultra-low-voltage operation poses. An innovative design methodology is presented, verified, and validated by four prototypes in advanced CMOS technologies. These prototypes are shown to achieve high energy-efficiency through their successful functionality at ultra-low supply voltages.

This book enables readers to achieve ultra-low energy digital system performance. The author’s main focus is the energy consumption of microcontroller architectures in digital (sub)-systems. The book covers a broad range of topics extensively: from circuits through design strategy to system architectures. The result is a set of techniques and a context to realize minimum energy digital systems. Several prototype silicon implementations are discussed, which put the proposed techniques to the test. The achieved results demonstrate an extraordinary combination of variation-resilience, high speed performance and ultra-low energy.

This book presents innovative strategies to implement ultra-low voltage (ULV) and low power active circuits used in low energy RF receivers. The authors demonstrate that the use of single-stage amplifiers with the input negative transconductance compensation is a key strategy to allow the operation at low voltage levels with reduced power dissipation. Also, some design methodologies, based on the CMOS transistor operation point, are analyzed and a powerful design methodology is described for this kind of circuit. Readers will be enabled to implement the techniques described to design communication circuits with low power dissipation, useful in a variety of applications, including IoT/IoE devices.

This book provides, for the first time, a broad and deep treatment of the fields of both ultra low power electronics and bioelectronics. It discusses fundamental principles and circuits for ultra low power electronic design and their applications in biomedical systems. It also discusses how ultra energy efficient cellular and neural systems in biology can inspire revolutionary low power architectures in mixed-signal and RF electronics. The book presents a unique, unifying view of ultra low power analog and digital electronics and emphasizes the use of the ultra energy efficient subthreshold regime of transistor operation in both. Chapters on batteries, energy harvesting, and the future of energy provide an understanding of fundamental relationships between energy use and energy generation at small scales and at large scales. A wealth of insights and examples from brain implants, cochlear implants, bio-molecular sensing, cardiac devices, and bio-inspired systems make the book useful and engaging for students and practicing engineers.

In our abundant computing infrastructure, performance improvements across most all application spaces are now severely limited by the energy dissipation involved in processing, storing, and moving data. The exponential increase in the volume of data to be handled by our computational infrastructure is driven in large part by unstructured data from countless sources. This book explores revolutionary device concepts, associated circuits, and architectures that will greatly extend the practical engineering limits of energy-efficient computation from device to circuit to system level. With chapters written by international experts in their corresponding field, the text investigates new approaches to lower energy requirements in computing. Features • Has a comprehensive coverage of various technologies • Written by international experts in their corresponding field • Covers revolutionary concepts at the device, circuit, and system levels

This book offers the first comprehensive coverage of digital design techniques to expand the power-performance tradeoff well beyond that allowed by conventional wide voltage scaling. Compared to conventional fixed designs, the approach described in this book makes digital circuits more versatile and adaptive, allowing simultaneous optimization at both ends of the power-performance spectrum. Drop-in solutions for fully automated and low-effort design based on commercial CAD tools are discussed extensively for processors, accelerators and on-chip memories, and are applicable to prominent applications (e.g., IoT, AI, wearables, biomedical). Through the higher power-performance versatility techniques described in this book, readers are enabled to reduce the design effort through reuse of the same digital design instance, across a wide range of applications. All concepts the authors discuss are demonstrated by dedicated testchip designs and experimental results. To make the results immediately usable by the reader, all the scripts necessary to create automated design flows based on commercial tools are provided and explained.

This book documents electric power requirements for the dismounted soldier on future Army battlefields, describes advanced energy concepts, and provides an integrated assessment of technologies likely to affect limitations and needs in the future. It surveys technologies associated with both supply and demand including: energy sources and systems; low power electronics and design; communications, computers, displays, and sensors; and networks, protocols, and operations. Advanced concepts discussed are predicated on continued development by the Army of soldier systems similar to the Land Warrior system on which the committee bases its projections on energy use. Finally, the volume proposes twenty research objectives to achieve energy goals in the 2025 time frame.