A 90-nm CMOS Low-Power GSM/EDGE Multimedia-Enhanced Baseband Processor With 380-MHz ARM926 Core and Mixed-Signal Extensions

Abstract

To meet the widely varying speed and power require- ments of multifunctional mobile devices, an appropriate combina- tion of technology features, circuit-level low-power techniques, and system architecture is implemented in a GSM/Edge baseband pro- cessor with multimedia and mixed-signal extensions. Power reduc- tion techniques and performance requirements are derived from an analysis of relevant use cases and applications. The 44 mm /50 baseband processor is fabricated in a 90-nm low-power CMOS technology with triple-well option and dual-gate oxide core devices. The ARM926 core achieves a maximum clock frequency of 380 MHz at 1.4-V supply due to the usage of thin oxide (1.6 nm) devices. Power dissipation can be adapted to the performance requirements by means of combined voltage and frequency scaling to reduce ac- tive power consumption in medium-performance mode by 68%. To reduce leakage currents during standby mode, large SRAM blocks, nFET sleep transistors, and circuit components with relaxed per- formance requirements are implemented using devices with 2.2-nm gate oxide thickness.