Gate leakage tolerant circuits in deep sub-100nm CMOS technologies

The leakage power consumption in deep sub-100nm CMOS systems is projected to become a significant part of the total power dissipation. Although the dual Vt CMOS process helps reduce the subthreshold leakage current, the gate leakage problem poses a significant design challenge. We introduce gate leakage tolerant circuits. We describe two new circuit techniques to suppress gate leakage currents in dual Vt Domino circuits. In standby mode, proposed circuits generate low inputs and low outputs for all Domino stages to suppress gate leakage currents in the NMOS logic tree. Simulation results using 45nm BSIM4 SPICE models for 32-bit adders show that adders using the two proposed circuits can reduce the standby gate leakage by 66% and 90%, respectively. Proposed adders have 7% active power overhead to achieve the same speed as single Vt domino adder and the area penalty is minimal with careful layout.