Abstract:
With the rise of semiconductor devices, there has been an exponential increase in their demand. By 2030, approximately 40 billion IoT devices are projected to exist globally. These devices’ design, fabrication, and operation require substantial energy, leading to significant greenhouse gas emissions and a detrimental environmental impact due to climate change. Traditional analyses of Power, Performance, and Area (PPA) are no longer sufficient to address this pressing issue. There is a crucial need for a framework that guides designers in making informed choices during the initial design phase, ensuring that their designs are more sustainable and have a reduced environmental impact. In this study, we present and validate a sustainability framework designed to conduct analyses of embodied, operational, and total carbon footprints, utilizing flip-flop architectures specifically optimized for IoT applications. Our analysis included the implementation of Transmission Gate Flip-Flop (TGFF), Change Sensing Flip-Flop (CSFF), and Contention-Free Change Sensing Flip-Flop (C2SFF) architectures with varied design choice variations. We compared their conventional performance metrics, such as Power, Performance, and Area, while also evaluating their impact on sustainability through the proposed framework. We demonstrated how our framework can aid designers in making informed decisions to achieve the most sustainable designs. The findings reveal that design choices are closely linked to the specific requirements of the target application, significantly influencing the design decisions necessary to attain an optimal level of sustainability. For the proposed formula and assumed factor values, for embodied carbon footprint the area of the design plays a crucial role, whereas for the operational carbon footprint, leakage and dynamic power are pivotal for estimating the sustainability of the design. Additionally, we emphasized the importance of total carbon footprint for sustainability analysis that should be considered alongside PPA to address the growing issue of climate change effectively.
