The energy required for running integrated circuits (ICs) is increasing in every new generation of electronic systems. At the same time the manufacturing process used to build these ICs are becoming less deterministic. Hence, low-power design under large parameter variations has emerged as an important challenge in the nanometer regime. The book, for the first time, integrates description of low power and variation issues and provides design solutions to simultaneously achieve low power and robust operation under variations.

Design considerations for low power and robustness with respect to variations typically impose contradictory requirements. Power reduction techniques such as voltage scaling, dual-threshold assignment and gate sizing can have large negative impact on parametric yield under process variations. This book introduces the specific challenges associated with low power and variation-tolerant design in the nanometer technology regime at different levels of design abstraction. It considers both logic and memory design aspects and encompass modeling, analysis as well as design methodology to simultaneously achieve low power and variation tolerance while minimizing design overhead. The issue of device degradation due to aging effects as well as temporal variation in device parameters due to environmental fluctuations are also addressed. Micro-architecture level design modifications, subthreshold design issues, statistical design approaches, design of low-power and robust digital signal processing (DSP) hardware, analog and mixed-signal circuits, reconfigurable computing platforms such as field programmable gate array (FPGA) are covered. The book also discusses emerging challenges at future technology nodes as well as methods industrial and academic researchers and engineers are developing to design low-power ICs under increasing parameter variations.