I. INTRODUCIION The first silicon retina, designed by Mead and Mahowald in the late 1980's [I], was an analog Very Large Scale Integration (aVLSI) system. The success of early Integrated Circuit (IC) implementations of biologically accurate neural circuits led to the exploration of many other computational systems, as well as work on development of silicon models of single neurons [2]. These aV...

Process variation has become a major concern in the design of many nanometer circuits, including interconnect pipelines. The primary sources of manufacturing variation include Deposition, Chemical Mechanical Planarization (CMP), Etching, Resolution Enhancement Technology (RET). Process variations manifest themselves as the uncertainties of circuit performance, such as delay, noise and power con...

We introduce an analog implementation of an ontogenic neural network (ONN) model and investigate its applicability to the field of built-in self-test (BIST) of RF circuits. Our chip consists of a reconfigurable array of synapses and neurons operating below threshold and featuring sub-μW power consumption. The synapse circuits employ dynamic weight storage for fast bidirectional weight updates d...

Sub/near-threshold static random-access memory (SRAM) design is crucial for addressing the bottleneck in power-constrained applications. However, high integration density and reliability under process variations demand an accurate estimation of extremely small failure probabilities. To capture such a “rare event” circuits, time storage overhead conventional simulations based on Monte Carlo (MC)...

High leakage current in deep-submicrometer designs have become a significant contributor to total power dissipation of CMOS circuits, as short-channel transistors require lower power supply levels to reduce power consumption. This forces a reduction in the threshold voltage that causes a substantial increase of weak inversion current. As evidence of this effect, the 2006 Edition of the Internat...

The ventral subiculum (vSUB) plays a key role in addiction, and identifying the neuronal circuits and synaptic mechanisms by which vSUB alters the excitability of dopamine neurons is a necessary step to understand the motor changes induced by cocaine. Here, we report that high-frequency stimulation of the vSUB (HFSvSUB) over-activates ventral tegmental area (VTA) dopamine neurons in vivo and tr...

With scaling of Vt sub-threshold leakage power is increasing and expected to become significant part of total power consumption.In present work three new configurations of level shifters for low power application in 0.35μm technology have been presented. The proposed circuits utilize the merits of stacking technique with smaller leakage current and reduction in leakage power. Conventional level...

Power dissipation is one of the critical design factors in microelectronics industry which opens lot of space for advance development in deep sub micron fabrication techniques for the devices. Low power design reduces cooling cost and increases reliability, especially for high density systems. Moreover, it reduces the weight and size of portable devices. In order to achieve the aim, static and ...

Static power consumption is nowadays a crucial design parameter in digital circuits due to emergent mobile products. Leakage currents, the main responsible for static power dissipation during idle mode, are increasing dramatically in sub-100nm processes. Subthershold leakage rises due to threshold voltage scaling while gate leakage current increases due to scaling of oxide thickness. It means t...

Our method uses the built-in scan-chain in a VLSI circuit to drive it with the minimum leakage vector when it enters the sleep mode. Using these scan registers eliminates the area and delay overhead of the additional circuitry that would otherwise be needed to apply the minimum leakage vector to the circuit. We show how the proposed technique can be used for several different scan-chain archite...