• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.41 no.10
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• pp.77-83
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• 2004

In low-power VLSI systems, it is effective to suppress leakage current by shutting down megablocks in idle states. Recently, multi-threshold voltage CMOS (MTCMOS) is widely accepted to shutdown power supply. However, it requires short wake-up time as operating frequency increases. This causes large current surge during wake-up process, and it often leads to system malfunction due to severe Power line noise. In this paper, a novel wake-up scheme is proposed to solve this problem. It exploits pipelined wake-up strategy in several stages that reduces maximum current on the power line and its corresponding power line noise. To evaluate its efficiency, the proposed scheme was applied to a multiplier block in the Compact Flash memory controller chip. Power line noise in shutdown and wake-up process was simulated and analyzed. From the simulation results, the proposed scheme was proven to greatly reduce the power line noise compared with conventional schemes.