Pros and Cons of ST and SIG FinFET Inverters for Low Power Designs

Advanced technologies introduce new challenges as higher process variability impact and tight power constraints, mainly for IoT applications. Schmitt Trigger inverters are traditionally used for noise immunity enhancement due to their hysteresis characteristic, and have been recently applied to mitigate radiation effects and process variability impact. Alongside, Stacked-Inverter Gates are applied for gain increase, consequently, robustness enhancement as well. Thus, the main contribution of this paper is to investigate the relationship between transistor sizing, supply voltage, energy, and process variability robustness to get a minimal energy consumption circuit with FinFET technology, while keeping robustness and to identify the recommended circuit for different applications. Results show that adjusting the supply voltage and transistor sizing, at a high variability scenario, it is possible to decrease the energy consumption up to 32.19% while maintaining adequate robustness. It was possible to show a considerable difference concerning the Schmitt Trigger noise-immunity characteristics, in comparison to other designs, over supply voltage and variability scaling.