Analysis and demonstration of MEM-relay power gating

This paper shows that due to their negligibly low leakage, in certain applications, chips utilizing power gates built even with today's relatively large, high-voltage micro-electro-mechanical (MEM) relays can achieve lower total energy than those built with CMOS transistors. A simple analysis provides design guidelines for off-time and savings estimates as a function of technology parameters, and quantifies the further benefits of scaled relay designs. Finally, we demonstrate a relay chip successfully power-gating a CMOS chip, and show a relay-based timer suitable for self-timed operation.