Innovative Approaches to Low Power, Sub-Threshold Electronic Circuits

This program will develop a revolutionary, ultra low power System-on-a-Chip (SoC) technology that will enable >10x improvements in size and endurance over current generation microsystems such as unattended ground sensing (UGS) systems, micro-UAVs, micro satellites, body worn electronics, etc. This will be achieved through the integration of advanced energy efficient circuit designs that enable the power consumption of the chip to be dynamically matched to the performance needs of the systems. While the technical approaches to intelligent, adaptive, ultra-low power architectures will be generic and broadly applicable to DoD systems specific hardware implementations will be delivered as proof-of-principle prototypes. These will be based on the digital processing “brain” of a microbolometer IR camera system, which is used in all of the above microsystem applications. The focus of this program is on the digital processing of the architecture. The goal is to synergistically integrate into an SoC the low power enabling capabilities of: · Subthreshold transistor operation. · Clockless self timed logic circuits. · Dynamically controlled power supply voltages determined by the data rate. Codetronix will support Camgian in this effort with their Mobius design specification and implementation tool.