Experimental measurement of a novel power gating structure with intermediate power saving mode

Abstract

A novel power gating structure is proposed for low-power, high-performance VLSI. This power gating structure supports an intermediate power saving mode as well as a traditional power cut-off mode. To evaluate our power gating structure, we design and fabricate three different macros in 0.13 /spl mu/m CMOS bulk technology. Our measurement results show that the additional intermediate power-mode allows us to cover various power-performance trade-off regimes, compared to conventional power gating structures.