Adaptive Digital Circuits for Power-Performance Range beyond Wide Voltage Scaling

Book excerpt: 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.