On July 23, 2021, Eng. Abdelrahman Hesham, Current ONE Lab Master student, has an accepted journal paper at Elsevier AEUE – International Journal of Electronics and Communications titled “Design and Implementation of Energy-Efficient Near-Threshold Standard Cell Library for IoT Applications“.
In this paper, a low-energy minimum-area CMOS standard cell library suitable for IoT applications is proposed. Energy consumption reduction is achieved by operating the library in Near-Threshold Voltage ( NTV ) region, and by designing layouts of cells at the minimum possible area for the used technology process. Body biasing technique is proposed to boost pMOS performance. Operating voltage and transistor sizing are also selected to achieve the minimum energy consumption while operating at the frequency range of 1MHz to 20MHz suitable for IoT applications. The proposed library was designed and characterized in UMC 130 nm CMOS technology process. The library was modeled to be used in physical design tools. To prove the benefit for IoT applications, the library was bench-marked by implementing 3 cryptography algorithms: ASCON , AEGIS-128, and AEZ . Results are showing that the cores can operate at 18 MHz, 14 MHz, and 16 MHz respectively, while consuming 10.03 pJ , 4.25 pJ , and 30.57 pJ .
