A Low Cost Individual-Well Adaptive Body Bias (IWABB) Scheme for Leakage Power Reduction and Performance Enhancement in the Presence of Intra-Die Variations

• Published in: Proceedings of the conference on Design, automation and test in Europe - Volume 1 p. 10240
• Main Authors: Chen, Tom W., Gregg, Justin
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: Washington, DC, USA IEEE Computer Society 16-02-2004
• Series: ACM Conferences
• Subjects: Hardware > Hardware test; Hardware > Hardware validation; Hardware > Hardware validation > Functional verification; Hardware > Robustness
• ISBN: 0769520855; 9780769520858
• DOI: 10.5555/968878.969035

This paper presents a new method of adapting body biasing on a chip during post-fabrication testing in order to mitigate the effects of process variations. Individual well biasing voltages can be changed to be connected either to a chip wide well bias or to a different bias voltage through a self-regulating mechanism, allowing biasing voltage adjustments on a per well basis. The scheme requires only one bias voltage distribution network, but allows for back biasing adjustments to more effectively mitigate die-to-die and within-die process variations. The biasing setting for each well is determined using a modified genetic algorithm. Our experimental results show that binning yields as low as 17% can be improved to greater than 90% after using the proposed IWABB method.