A New Leakage Optimization Approach for IoTs Physical Design

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a fast-emerging field, primed to become the biggest semiconductor market for the electronics industry. Most IoT circuits are battery powered applications, and the autonomy is an extremely important characteristic to be competitive in this market. Leakage power is the main power component that dictate the IoT devices autonomy and their batteries life cycle. Many design iterations are needed to meet the required leakage target due to the absence of precise power and timing models at early design phases, and the absence of strong leakage optimization approaches at final design stages. In this paper, we will present a post-route sizing-based leakage reduction technique as a solution for the short coming of the current design methodology. This new approach was deployed on 31 industrial designs of different customers, sizes, technologies, and complexities, and has realized an average gain of 9.5% of leakage power, and an average reduction of similar to 1.3% of total power consumption, with an impartial effect on setup timing and an average improvement of 17.11% of hold timing.