Browsing by Author "Huang, Ching-Ji"

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An Ultra-Low Voltage Hearing Aid Chip using Variable-Latency Design Technique
(2014-01-01)
Chang, Kuo-Chiang
;
Luo, Shien-Chun
;
Huang, Ching-Ji
;
Liu, Chih-Wei
;
Chu, Yuan-Hua
This paper presents a low-power hearing aid chip which operates under near-threshold voltage region to minimize energy consumption. The proposed variable-latency design technique compensates the performance degradation under ultra-low voltage, while the proposed FIR filter computing datapath improves the energy efficiency for filter bank computation in hearing aids. The hearing aid system composed of four heterogeneous processing elements to optimize the flexibility and power consumption. The overall system was fabricated in TSMC 65nm LP process. The measured results show that the power consumption achieves 500 mu W at 0.5V and 6 MHz.
Separate Clock Network Voltage for Correcting Random Errors in ULV Clocked Storage Cells
(2014-12-01)
Luo, Shien-Chun
;
Chang, Kuo-Chiang
;
Chen, Ming-Pin
;
Huang, Ching-Ji
;
Chiu, Yi-Fang
This brief presents an implementation of ultralow-power microcontrollers that use a separate clock network voltage (SCNV) to correct unexpected errors produced by on-chip variations (OCVs). Separating the clock network voltage requires amendments in the standard cell library and physical designs. Here, the experiments used a 65-nm technology that exhibited considerable OCVs, which caused write and retention errors in clocked storage cells and limited the voltage scaling of microcontrollers. Using the SCNV provides an extraordinary operability to correct errors in the low-voltage clocked storage cells. In addition, the area overhead of the proposed implementation is negligible. Applying the SCNV, the measurement results indicate that the microcontrollers can be operated below 0.3 V, over 0.15-V extension in voltage scaling, and achieve the optimal energy consumption at 0.34 V. Separating the clock network voltage has tradeoff issues in system timing and energy consumption based on the measurement results, and this brief discusses proper applications.