A 25MHz 7μW/MHz ultra-low-voltage microcontroller SoC in 65nm LP/GP CMOS for low-carbon wireless sensor nodes

Abstract

The vision of the Internet of Things with ambient intelligence calls for the deployment of up to a trillion connected wireless sensor nodes (WSNs). Minimizing the carbon footprint of each node is paramount from the sustainability perspective. In ultra-low-power applications, the life-cycle carbon footprint results from a complex balance between both embodied and use-phase energies [1]. The embodied energy arises mainly from CMOS chip manufacturing, and is essentially proportional to die area. Use-phase energy depends on both active and sleep-mode power, because of long stand-by periods in WSNs. In this paper, we present an ultra-low-power 25MHz microcontroller SoC that fully exploits the versatility of a 65nm CMOS process with a low-power/general-purpose (LP/GP) transistor mix (dual-core oxide) to obtain: i) 7μW/MHz active power consumption due to a 0.4V ultra-low-voltage (ULV) thin-core-oxide (GP) CPU supplied by a 78%-efficiency embedded DC/DC converter; ii) 0.66mm2 die area for low embodied energy due to a compact converter design and a dual-VDD architecture, enabling the use of the foundry's 1V high-density 6T SRAM bitcell; and, iii) 1.5μW sleep-mode power due to body-biased sleep transistors embedded into the converter and thick-core-oxide (LP) MOSFETs for retentive SRAM and always-on peripherals (AOP). Moreover, an on-chip adaptive voltage scaling (AVS) system controlling the converter ensures safe 25MHz operation at ULV for all PVT conditions. A multi-Vt clock tree is also proposed to achieve reliable timing closure with low-power SoC features. Finally, a glitch-masking instruction cache (I$) is implemented to reduce the access power of the 1V program memory (PMEM).