The essential figures of merit of a digital circuit or system are speed and power consumption. The usual measure for speed is a (reciprocal) delay time or a maximum clock frequency . Power efficiency can be determined as the total power or in terms of a switching energy , i.e., the average energy consumed for one switching transition of a device. Precise definitions and methods for measuring or computing these figures of merit are given in Chapter 3 together with a basic introduction to VLSI circuits and technology in Appendix A. For the purpose of this section, i.e., to develop the foundation for Ultra-Low-Power technologies, we will use a set of simpler equations which are accurate enough to reflect the fundamental relations between the digital system and the operating conditions on the one hand, and speed and power consumption on the other hand.
For the following, we will consider a digital circuit as a network of switches with parasitic capacitances, which can be described statistically in terms of average values (for more background information refer to Sections A.2 and A.3). Thus, we examine one representative pair switches that charge and discharge a representative load capacitance to the supply voltage with a current . Each switch in the off-state draws a leakage current . For simplicity, any short-circuit current flowing across the switches is assumed to be negligible (which is usually acceptable), and a pair of switches is regarded as one device.
The total power consumption per device is the sum of a dynamic component from
charging and discharging the capacitance and a static component
from the leakage current:
The speed of a digital circuit can be characterized in two ways:
the delay time
which is assumed as
Clearly, a system is most efficient when operated at the
maximum clock frequency. Combining (2.2), (2.4), and
(2.5) assuming that
yields the following
fundamental equation:
Aside from circuit functionality and speed and assuming to be essentially constant the following two conclusions can be drawn from (2.6):