LOW POWER CMOS SUB-THRESHOLD

CIRCUITS
KALYANI S. BHOSALE
ROLL NO: ME13EM05

Introduction
Transistor

scaling age old solution

to consumption decrease and
speed increase.
For that transistor was operated in
the strong inversion region.
3 operating regions of transistor:
Weak

Inversion Region
Moderate Inversion Region
Strong Inversion Region

Weak Inversion Region

In this region ,
drain current

short circuit dissipation

in turn resulting decrease in
operational speed
(compared to strong inversion)

So why go for operation in weak

inversion region ?
Trade

off between speed and power

Applications in which power
consumption is an important factor
For such applications speed is not a
limiting factor
Eg: energy harvesting applications to
create self powered microsystems,
wireless sensor nodes etc

The Operation Regions

Fig: All
transisto
r
operatio
n
regions
(Courtesy:
Operation
and
Modeling of
the MOS
Transistor
2nd ed.,
Y. Tsividis)

Equ (i): All region single-piece model expression

When

operating in the subthreshold region, the drain current

is given as:

where represents the drain current

when
and is given by,

Fig 2: IDDsub Vds characteristics in subthreshold operation region [1]

CMOS Inverter

Fig 3: a) CMOS Inverter

b) MOS transistor

characteristic[1]

Fig 4: VTC of CMOS inverter in sub-threshold

region [1]

Threshold voltage
is sub-threshold region
is obtained in the same way as in strong
inversion region, by equalizing currents

Replacing
we get,

and solving for

If the inverter is symmetric, i.e. if

then,

Observations and
Conclusions
There

is a complete behaviour analogy of

digital circuits in both operation regions.
The difference is in the functional
dependence of the parameters.
In strong inversion region, the
dependence is quadratic, i.e. square root,
and in sub-threshold exponential, i.e.
logarithmic.
The behaviour analogy enables the
usage of the same topologies for digital
circuits in both operation regions.

References
[1] B. Dokic and A. Pajkanovic, Low power cmos subthreshold circuits, in Information Communication
Technology Electronics Microelectronics (MIPRO), 2013
36th International Convention on, 2013, pp. 6065.
[2] Neil Weste and Kamaran, Principles of CMOS VLSI
Design, Education Asia.
[3] Y. Tsividis, Operation and Modeling of the MOS
Transistor, 2nd Ed. Oxford University Press, 2011.

Questions

Thank you !