Sub-Threshold Design - A Revolutionary Approach to Eliminating Power

Mike Salas, VP Marketing, Ambiq Micro
EDN (December 22, 2014)

Low energy consumption has replaced performance as the foremost challenge in electronic design. Performance is important, but it must now accede to the energy capacity of batteries and even the minimal output of energy harvesters. Performance at all costs no longer works; energy consumption is now the dominant requirement. While reducing energy consumption is critically important throughout the electronics industry, the question is: how should that goal be achieved? Ambiq Micro’s approach moves beyond the incremental improvements that other semiconductor companies have taken and makes revolutionary advances through a unique approach to the problem: sub-threshold circuit design.

Energy is consumed in two fundamental ways: as leakage, when a circuit’s state isn’t changing, and dynamically as internal nodes are charged up and down. For realistic circuits in operation, dynamic power dominates – especially for the higher power supply voltages used in most designs today.

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