Motivated by emerging battery-operated applications that demand intensive computation in portable environments, techniques are investigated which reduce power consumption in CMOS digital circuits while maintaining computational throughput. Techniques for low-power operation are shown which use the lowest possible supply voltage coupled with architectural, logic style, circuit, and technology optimizations. An architecturally based scaling strategy is presented which indicates that the optimum voltage is much lower than that determined by other scaling considerations. This optimum is achieved by trading increased silicon area for reduced power consumption.>
Chandrakasan et al. (1992) studied this question.