Design exploration of a 65 nm Sub-VT CMOS digital decimation filter chain

This paper presents an analysis on energy dissipation of digital half-band filters operating in the sub-threshold (sub-VT) region with throughput and supply voltage constraints. A 12-bit filter is implemented along with various unfolded structures, used to form a decimation filter chain. The designs are synthesized in a 65 nm low-leakage CMOS technology with various threshold voltages. A sub-VT energy model is applied to characterize the designs in the sub-VT domain. The results show that the low-leakage standard-threshold technology is suitable for the required throughput range between 250Ksamples/s and 2Msamples/s, at a supply voltage of 260mV. The total energy dissipation of the filter is 205 fJ per sample