Gated Decap: Gate leakage control of on-chip decoupling capacitors in scaled technologies

A novel on-chip Decoupling Capacitor (Decap) design - Gated Decoupling Capacitor (GDecap) - is proposed to minimize the leakage power dissipation associated with present-day on-chip decoupling capacitors. Experiments on the application of GDecap in an 8-way clock-gated cluster pipeline show that on average, 41.7% Decap leakage power is improved, with only 0.037% worst-case performance degradation, at 70nm technology node. Around 5.36% area overhead in Decap area is incurred, compared to the conventional Decap deployment. © 2005 IEEE.