Design of a family of sleep transistor cells for a clustered power-gating flow in 65nm technology

Clustered sleep transistor insertion is an effective leakage power reduction technique that is well-suited for integration in an automated design flow and offers a flexible tradeoff between area, delay overhead and turn-on transition time. In this work, we focus on the design of a family of sleep transistor cells, fully compatible with the physical design rules of a commercial 65nm CMOS library. We describe circuit-level and layout optimizations, as well as the cell characterization procedure required to support automated sleep transistor cell selection and instantiation in a clustered power-gating insertion flow.