A 0.9-V CMOS 32-BIT MICROPROCESSOR

A 32-bit RISC microprocessor V810 having a 5-stage pipeline structure and a 1 kbyte direct-mapped instruction cache realizes 1 MHz operation at 1 V and 0.8 mW power consumption. To enable battery operation, the minimum supply voltage is reduced to the value of 0.9 V. In order to overcome the narrowing noise margin, every signal is designed to have rail-to-rail swing with pseudo-static circuit technique. Chips are fab ricated using a 0.8 mu m double metal layer CMOS process technology to integrate 240,000 transistors on 7.7 x 7.7 mm(2) die.