Low Voltage Circuit Design Techniques for 32nm and Beyond

In order to continue CMOS scaling towards the physical limit, care must be taken to account for each obstacle that is currently impeding our progress.
The impact of Process-Voltage-Temperature (PVT) variations on circuit performance has increased with device scaling. Reliability issues such as Negative Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI) have become serious problems degrading the long term yield of high performance systems. Increased power consumption and faster current transients have deteriorated on-chip power supply integrity. The need for a robust high-density on-chip memory will continue to grow for future multicore processors. In this talk, I will introduce some of the on-going research activities at the University of Minnesota concerning low voltage digital, mixed-signal, and memory circuit design in the nanometer regime. Topics will range from on-chip reliability monitor circuits and supply noise cancellation techniques to practical demonstrations of high-density embedded SRAM and DRAM.

Chris H. Kim received his B.S. degree in electrical engineering and his M.S.
degree in biomedical engineering from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea. He received the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA. He spent a year at Intel Corporation where he performed research on variation-tolerant circuits, on-die leakage sensor design and crosstalk noise analysis. He joined the electrical and computer engineering faculty at University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, in 2004.

Prof. Kim is the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, Mcknight Foundation Land-Grant Professorship, 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award, DAC/ISSCC Student Design Contest Awards, IBM Faculty Partnership Awards, IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Outstanding Young Author Award, ISLPED Low Power Design Contest Award, Intel Ph.D. Fellowship, and Magoon's Award for Excellence in Teaching. He is an author/coauthor of 60+ journal and conference papers and has served as a technical program committee member for numerous circuit design conferences. His current research interests include digital, mixed-signal, and memory circuit design for silicon and non-silicon technologies.