Power consumption is one of the most important design factors in modern electronic design. With a large market increase in portable battery-operated devices and push for environmental focus, it is of interest for the industry to decrease the power consumption of modern chips as much as possible. However, as circuits scale down in size the leakage current increases. This increases the static power consumption, and in future technologies the static power is expected to make up most of the overall power consumption. Power gating can decrease static power by isolating a circuit block from the power supply. In large chips, this requires state-retention flip flops and non-volatile memories in order to keep the circuit functioning continuously between power gating sequences. A design concept utilizing this is a Normally Off computer, which is in an off-state with no static power for the majority of the time. This is achieved by using non-volatile logic and memories. This concept has been realized by using a new semiconductor technology developed at Semiconductor Energy Laboratories Corporation Ltd., which is known as crystalline In-Ga-Zn oxide semiconductor material. This technology realizes transistors with an ultra-low off-state current, and enables several novel designs of state-retention circuits suitable for Normally-Off computers. This thesis presents two different architectures of state retention flip flops utilizing In-Ga-Zn oxide semiconductor transistors, which are produced and compared to determine their tradeoffs and effectiveness. These flip flops are then implemented in a 32-bit Normally-Off microprocessor to determine the performance of each implementation. This is evaluated by calculating the energy break-even time, which is the power gating time required to overcome the power overhead introduced by the state-retention flip flops. The resulting circuits and the work in this thesis has been presented at two conferences and submitted for publication in one scientific journal.

In the present study, I describe the linguistic expression of space in Caac, an Oceanic language spoken in New Caledonia, from both a descriptive and theoretical perspective. Caac is a minority language whose transmission process is not ensured anymore; it is also an under-documented language. Part I provides a concise description of Caac grammar, presenting thereby a first formal portrait of this language to the reader. Part II describes the formal and semantic features of the linguistic resources available in Caac to encode spatial relationships. Part III presents the theoretical framework based on and exploring further the vector analysis developed by Bohnemeyer (2012) and Bohnemeyer & O’Meara (2012). In particular, I propose an additional sub-category of vectors (Head-unspecified Vectors) which account for the uses of centrifugal forms in Caac. The resulting theoretical framework enables me to provide a systematic account of expressions of orientation as well as location and motion, and to combine the Frames of Reference typology (Pederson et al. 1998; Levinson, 1996, 2003; Bohnemeyer & Levinson, not dated) with an analysis of deictic expressions within a single framework. It also allows us to give a detailed analysis of the uses and combinations of Caac absolute and deictic directionals, which are spatial terms of primary importance for spatial reference in Caac. Special attention, moreover, is given to the use of directionals in spatial constructions involving Fictive Motion. The analysis of Caac data leads us to introduce an additional category of Fictive Motion beyond those previously recognised in the literature, labelled here ‘Anticipated Paths’. In the conclusion, I propose a functional and cultural-specific explanation for the emergence of this construction. Anticipated Path expressions in turn shed new light on the nature of vectors and the relationship between location, motion and orientation.

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