Fined-grained body biasing for frequency scaling in advanced SOI processes

Johannes Maximilian Kühn, Hideharu Amano, Oliver Bringmann, Wolfgang Rosenstiel

Abstract: New SOI processes offer unprecedented flexibility in regard to low-power and performance. The use of fine-grained body biasing in STMicro's 28nm UTBB-FDSOI is evaluated for a Dynamically Reconfigurable Processor design in a frequency scaling scenario. Three different strategies are evaluated for Processing Elements: Static, programmable and dynamic body biasing. Fine-grained body biasing significantly mitigates increased leakage currents of forward body biasing between 42.85% to 64.5% on average. This makes static body biasing a viable low-cost option and makes dynamic body biasing worthwhile even at short time periods.