A 1.5-V full-swing bootstrapped CMOS large capacitive-load drivercircuit suitable for low-voltage CMOS VLSI

This paper reports a 1.5-V full-swing bootstrapped CMOS large capacitive-load driver circuit using two bootstrap capacitors to enhance the switching speed for low-voltage CMOS VLSI. For a supply voltage of 1.5 V, the full-swing bootstrapped CMOS driver circuit shows a 2.2 times improvement in switching speed in driving a capacitive load of 10 pF as compared to the conventional CMOS driver circuit. Even for a supply voltage of 1 V, this full-swing bootstrapped CMOS large capacitive-load driver circuit is still advantageous     

DB-driver: a low power CMOS bootstrapped differential cross-coupled driver

This paper for the first time reports the design of a high speed and low power differential cross-coupled bootstrapped CMOS driver circuit. The circuit design style, based on the proposed differential cross-coupled bootstrapped driver achieves high performance low core area, and fast full-swing operation, even in spite of the fact that the magnitude of the threshold voltage of the CMOS devices cannot be scaled down with the scaling of the power supply voltage. The proposed driver is implemented on 0.13?µm CMOS technology with a power supply of 1.2?V. It is 34% faster and provides 8% less core area when compared to a base-line circuit using an indirect bootstrap technique. In addition, the proposed driver reduces the power consumption by 35%. The superior performance of the proposed circuit over the other differential cross-coupled bootstrapped CMOS driver circuit, for the applications that require high performance, has been verified with post-layout simulation.     

Sub-1 V CMOS large capacitive-load driver circuit using directbootstrap technique for low-voltage CMOS VLSI

A novel sub-1 V CMOS large capacitive-load driver circuit using a direct bootstrap technique for low-voltage CMOS VLSI is reported. For a supply voltage of 1 V, the CMOS large capacitive-load driver circuit using the direct bootstrap technique shows a 3.3 times improvement in switching speed in driving a capacitive load of 2 pF compared to the conventional bootstrapped CMOS driver circuit using an indirect bootstrap technique. Even for a supply voltage of 0.8 V, this CMOS large capacitive load driver circuit using the direct bootstrap technique is still advantageous     

Noncomplementary BiCMOS logic and CMOS logic for low-voltage,low-power operation-a comparative study

This paper presents results of a comprehensive comparative study of six bipolar complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (BiCMOS) noncomplementary logic design styles and two CMOS logic styles for low-voltage, low-power operation. These logic styles have been compared for switching power consumption and power efficiency (power-delay product). The examination offers two alternative approaches never used in other comparative studies. First, all BiCMOS-based styles are compared to low-power CMOS styles as opposed to a single conventional static CMOS style. Second, a low-power methodology has been used as opposed to performance methodology referred to in the previous logic comparisons. The styles examined are bootstrapped BiCMOS, bootstrapped full-swing BiCMOS, bootstrapped bipolar CMOS, Seng-Rofail's bootstrapped BiCMOS, modified full-swing BiCMOS, dynamic full-swing BiCMOS, double pass-transistor CMOS, and inverter-based CMOS. These design styles have been compared at various power supply voltages (0.9-3 V), with various output load capacitances (0.1-1 pF) at the frequency 50 MHz and temperature 27°C. The results clearly show which logic style is the most beneficial for which specific conditions     

Low power dynamic circuit for power efficient bit lines

In this paper, a low power dynamic circuit is presented to reduce the power consumption of bit lines in multi-port memories. Using the proposed circuit, the voltage swing of the pull-down network is lowered to reduce the power consumption of wide fan-in gates employed in memory’s bit lines. Wide fan-in OR gates are designed and simulated using the proposed dynamic circuit in 90 nm CMOS technology. Simulation results show at least 40% reduction of power consumption and 1.2X noise immunity improvement compared to the conventional dynamic circuits at the same delay. Exploiting the proposed dynamic circuit, wide fan-in multiplexers are also designed. The multiplexers are simulated using a 90 nm CMOS model in all process corners. The results show 41% power reduction and 27% speed improvement for the proposed 128-input multiplexer in comparison with the conventional multiplexer at the same noise immunity.     

A High-Speed Variation-Tolerant Interconnect Technique for Sub-Threshold Circuits Using Capacitive Boosting

This paper describes an interconnect technique for subthreshold circuits to improve global wire delay and reduce the delay variation due to process-voltage-temperature (PVT) fluctuations. By internally boosting the gate voltage of the driver transistors, operating region is shifted from subthreshold region to super-threshold region enhancing performance and improving tolerance to PVT variations. Simulations of a clock distribution network using the proposed driver shows a 66%-76% reduction in 3sigma clock skew value and 84%-88% reduction in clock tree delay compared to using conventional drivers. A 0.4-V test chip has been fabricated in a 0.18-mum 6-metal CMOS process to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. Measurement results show 2.6times faster switching speed and 2.4times less delay sensitivity under temperature variations.     

Low-Power CMOS Synchronous Counter With Clock Gating Embedded Into Carry Propagation

A novel low-power CMOS synchronous counter whose clock-gating logic is embedded into a carry propagation circuit is proposed. The proposed synchronous counter operates with no redundant transitions and requires fewer transistors, minimizing the switching power consumption and silicon area as compared with conventional CMOS synchronous counters. The proposed synchronous counter consisting of 16 bits was fabricated in 0.18- $muhbox{m}$ CMOS technology. The experimental result indicates that the proposed synchronous counter achieves a power saving of 64% with 15% device count reduction.      

Conditional-capture flip-flop for statistical power reduction

This paper describes a family of novel low-power flip-flops, collectively called conditional-capture flip-flops (CCFFs). They achieve statistical power reduction by eliminating redundant transitions of internal nodes. These flip-flops also have negative setup time and thus provide small data-to-output latency and attribute of soft-clock edge for overcoming clock skew-related cycle time loss. The simulation comparison indicates that the proposed differential flip-flop achieves power savings of up to 61% with no impact on latency while the single-ended structure provides the maximum power savings of around 67%, as compared to conventional flip-flops. With a typical switching activity of 0.33, the power consumption is reduced by as much as 23-30% with comparable minimum data-to-output latency. It is also indicated that the proposed single-ended structure provides power comparable to the fully static master-slave design with significantly reduced data-to-output latency. An eight-bit counter was fabricated using a 0.35-μm CMOS technology, and the experimental results indicate that the counter using the differential CCFF saves the overall power consumption by about 30% as compared to that using the conventional flip-flop     

A 10-bit 50-MS/s redundant SAR ADC with split capacitive-array DAC

A new architecture for successive-approximation register analog-to-digital converters (SAR ADC) using generalized non-binary search algorithm is proposed to reduce the complexity and power consumption of the digital circuitry. The proposed architecture is based on the split capacitive-array DAC with a simple switching logic as compared to the conventional non-binary SAR ADC architecture. A 10-bit 50-MS/s SAR ADC is designed based on the proposed architecture in a 0.18 μm CMOS technology. Simulation results show that at a supply voltage of 1.2 V, the SAR ADC achieves a peak signal-to-noise-and-distortion ratio of 59.5 dB, and a power consumption of 1.3 mW, resulting in a figure of merit of 33 fJ/conversion-step.     

Novel low leakage and energy efficient dual-pullup/dual-pulldown repeater

Transistor threshold voltage (V_t) scaling causes higher power consumption by increasing the subthreshold leakage and short-circuit currents in CMOS circuits. Leakage currents are significant contributors to the overall power consumption of digital systems-on-chip as threshold voltage, channel length, and gate oxide thickness are reduced with CMOS technology scaling. A new dual-pullup/dual-pulldown (DPU/DPD) repeater is proposed in this paper for higher energy efficiency in low-voltage and low-frequency applications. The standby mode leakage power consumption is reduced by 59.11% with the proposed clock tree as compared to the conventional 3 level H-tree operating with a power supply voltage of 1.0V in a 45 nm CMOS technology. The short-circuit currents are suppressed by selectively employing high-V_t transistors in the repeaters. The clock network with the proposed buffer lowers the active mode energy consumption by up to 24.91% as compared to a conventional clock tree under equal silicon area constraint. Post layout results reveal that the statistical spread of clock skew in the DPU/DPD H-tree is also 20.60% lower than the conventional H-tree network.     

Design of a low-power 8 × 8-bit parallel multiplier using MOS current mode logic circuit

This paper proposes an 8?×?8 bit parallel multiplier using MOS current mode logic (MCML) for low power consumption. The 8?×?8 bit multiplier is designed with the proposed MCML full adders and the conventional full adders. The proposed multiplier is achieved to reduce the power consumption by 9.4% and the power-delay-product by 11.7% compared with the conventional circuit. The validity and effectiveness are verified through HSPICE simulation. The proposed multiplier is designed with the Samsung 0.35?μm standard CMOS process.     

A 0.6 V 100 KS/s 8–10 b resolution configurable SAR ADC in 0.18 μm CMOS

A resolution configurable ultra-low power SAR ADC in 0.18 μm CMOS process is presented. The proposed ADC has maximum sampling rate of 100 KS/s with configurable resolution from 8 to 10 b and operates at a supply of 0.6 V. Two-stage bootstrapped switch and voltage boosting techniques are introduced to improve the performance of the ADC at low voltage. To reduce the power consumption of the analog components of the ADC, monotonic capacitor switching procedure and fully dynamic comparator are utilized. The implementation of dynamic logic further reduces the power of the digital circuits. Post-layout simulation results show that the proposed SAR ADC consumes 521 nW and achieves an SNDR of 60.54 dB at 10 b mode, resulting in an ultra-low figure-of-merit of 6.0 fJ/conversion-step. The ADC core occupies an active area of only 350 × 280 μm².     

Minimization of switching activities of partial products for designing low-power multipliers

This work presents low-power 2's complement multipliers by minimizing the switching activities of partial products using the radix-4 Booth algorithm. Before computation for two input data, the one with a smaller effective dynamic range is processed to generate Booth codes, thereby increasing the probability that the partial products become zero. By employing the dynamic-range determination unit to control input data paths, the multiplier with a column-based adder tree of compressors or counters is designed. To further reduce power consumption, the two multipliers based on row-based and hybrid-based adder trees are realized with operations on effective dynamic ranges of input data. Functional blocks of these two multipliers can preserve their previous input states for noneffective dynamic data ranges and thus, reduce the number of their switching operations. To illustrate the proposed multipliers exhibiting low-power dissipation, the theoretical analyzes of switching activities of partial products are derived. The proposed 16 /spl times/ 16-bit multiplier with the column-based adder tree conserves more than 31.2%, 19.1%, and 33.0% of power consumed by the conventional multiplier, in applications of the ADPCM audio, G.723.1 speech, and wavelet-based image coders, respectively. Furthermore, the proposed multipliers with row-based, hybrid-based adder trees reduce power consumption by over 35.3%, 25.3% and 39.6%, and 33.4%, 24.9% and 36.9%, respectively. When considering product factors of hardware areas, critical delays and power consumption, the proposed multipliers can outperform the conventional multipliers. Consequently, the multipliers proposed herein can be broadly used in various media processing to yield low-power consumption at limited hardware cost or little slowing of speed.     

Low power and high speed multiplier design with row bypassing and parallel architecture

This paper presents a low power and high speed row bypassing multiplier. The primary power reductions are obtained by tuning off MOS components through multiplexers when the operands of multiplier are zero. Analysis of the conventional DSP applications shows that the average of zero input of operand in multiplier is 73.8 percent. Therefore, significant power consumption can be reduced by the proposed bypassing multiplier. The proposed multiplier adopts ripple-carry adder with fewer additional hardware components. In addition, the proposed bypassing architecture can enhance operating speed by the additional parallel architecture to shorten the delay time of the proposed multiplier. Both unsigned and signed operands of multiplier are developed. Post-layout simulations are performed with standard TSMC 0.18 μm CMOS technology and 1.8 V supply voltage by Cadence Spectre simulation tools. Simulation results show that the proposed design can reduce power consumption and operating speed compared to those of counterparts. For a 16×16 multiplier, the proposed design achieves 17 and 36 percent reduction in power consumption and delay, respectively, at the cost of 20 percent increase of chip area in comparison with those of conventional array multipliers. In addition, the proposed design achieves averages of 11 and 38 percent reduction in power consumption and delay with 46 percent less chip area in comparison with those counterparts for both unsigned and signed multipliers. The proposed design is suitable for low power and high speed arithmetic applications.     

A 1.33 μW 10-bit 200KS/s SAR ADC with a tri-level based capacitor switching procedure

A 10-bit successive approximation register (SAR) analog-to-digital converter (ADC) using an energy-efficient tri-level based capacitor switching procedure is presented. The proposed switching procedure achieves 97.66% less switching energy when compared to the conventional method. The number of unit capacitors is reduced by a factor of 4 over that of conventional architecture as well. To make the power consumption of the comparator scale down with respect to the comparison rate, the fully dynamic comparator is used. Moreover, the dynamic logic circuit is implemented to further reduce the power of digital circuits. The ADC is implemented in a 0.18 μm 1P6M CMOS technology. At 1.0-V power supply and 200KS/s, the ADC achieves an SNDR of 60.54 dB and consumes 1.33 μW, resulting in a figure-of-merit (FOM) of 7.7 fJ/conversion-step. The ADC core occupies an active area of only 230×400 µm².     

A common-gate bootstrapped CMOS rectifier for VHF isolated DC-DC converter

A common-gate bootstrapped CMOS rectifier dedicated for VHF (very high frequency) isolated DC-DC converter is proposed.It uses common-gate bootstrapped technique to compensate the power loss due to the threshold voltage,and to solve the reflux problem in the conventional rectifier circuit.As a result,it improves the power conversion efficiency (PCE) and voltage conversion ratio (VCR).The design saves almost 90% of the area compared to a previously reported double capacitor structure.In addition,we compare the previous rectifier with the proposed common-gate bootstrapped rectifier in the case of the same area;simulation results show that the PCE and VCR of the proposed structure are superior to other structures.The proposed common-gate bootstrapped rectifier was fabricated by using CSMC 0.5 μm BCD process.The measured maximum PCE is 86% and VCR achieves 77% at the operating frequency of 20 MHz.The average PCE is about 79% and average VCR achieves 71% in the frequency range of 30-70 MHz.Measured PCE and VCR have been improved compared to previous results.     

Analysis and design of high-speed and low-power CMOS PLAs

The programmable logic array (PLA) is a basic and important building circuit for VLSI chips. Operating behaviors of several conventional PLAs are analyzed first to find out their speed and power bottlenecks. Then, new circuit design techniques for the CMOS PLA are proposed in the hopes of fulfilling the requirements of high speed and low power at the same time. Finally, high speed is achieved through the combined effect of utilization of a fast pseudofootless dynamic circuit and a reduced interplane clock delay. On the other hand, low power is achieved because the power consumption from the three main sources, i.e., the AND-plane circuits, the interplane buffers, and the OR-plane circuits, can be reduced significantly and simultaneously. The delay time and the power consumption of the critical path of a PLA are taken as the performance evaluation parameters. When the 50×50×64 PLAs are designed in a 0.35-μm 1P4M CMOS technology, the maximum operating frequency of the proposed PLA is 1.61 times higher than that of the fastest conventional PLA. Furthermore, power reduction can be as high as 18% and 43% when the operating frequencies are set to be 100 MHz and 50 MHz, respectively, as compared to the most power-efficient conventional PLA     

Low-power high-speed phase frequency detector based on carbon nano-tube field effect transistors

A phase frequency detector (PFD) with a very low dead zone is proposed which is based on a configuration adaptable to both CMOS or carbon nano-tube transistors (CNTFETs). In the first step the proposed configuration is designed using CMOS transistors, and then CNTFETs are substituted to improve the speed and reduce the propagation delay. The proposed PFD in addition to very low dead zone, has low power consumption and high frequency range of operation, which are achieved as a result of the elimination of the reset path. The simulation results based on 32 nm technology for CNTFET and 180 nm technology for CMOS, illustrate that CNTFET-based proposed circuit dissipates 2 µW and has frequency of operation up to 30 GHz, and the dead zone equal to 1 ps. Compared to the conventional PFD based on CMOS technology, its dead zone and power consumption are lower. In addition, the effects of blocks’ parameters including the phase detector, which affect the operation of the phase locked loop, or delay locked loop, are systematically analyzed.

     

一种10位80 Ms/s逐次逼近A/D转换器

基于65 nm CMOS工艺,设计了一种10位80 Ms/s的逐次逼近A/D转换器。该A/D转换器采用1.2 V电源供电以及差分输入、拆分单调的DAC网络结构。采用拆分单调的电容阵列DAC,可以有效降低A/D转换所消耗的能量,缩短DAC的建立时间,降低控制逻辑的复杂度,提高转换速度;避免了由于比较器共模电平下降过多引起的比较器失调,从而降低了比较器的设计难度,改善了ADC的线性度。动态比较器降低了A/D转换的功耗。使用Spectre进行仿真验证,结果表明,当采样频率为80 MHz,输入信号频率为40 MHz时,该A/D转换器的SFDR为72 dBc。     

High speed interconnect through device optimization for subthreshold FPGA

Field programmable gate array (FPGA) consumes a significant amount of static and dynamic power due to the presence of additional logic for providing more flexibility as compared to application specific integrated circuits (ASICs). The fabrication cost of ASICs is rising exponentially in deep submicron and hence it is important to investigate different techniques for reducing FPGA power consumption so that they can also be employed in place of ASICs in portable energy constrained applications. It is also important to investigate the possibility of extending the use of FPGA even to subthreshold region for ultra low power (ULP) applications. Interconnect resources of an FPGA consumes most of the chip power, area and also determines the overall circuit delay. Subthreshold circuits show orders of magnitude power saving over superthreshold circuits. Improving the performance of subthreshold circuits is a main design challenge at the circuit and device levels to spread their application area. This paper proposes to improve the performance of subthreshold FPGA in terms of delay and switching energy by optimizing and operating interconnect drivers in the near threshold operating region. The possibility of inserting repeaters and the suitability of CNT as an interconnect in the subthreshold region are also explored. The simulation of FPGA interconnect resources using the proposed technique shows 67%, 73.33% and 61.8% increase in speed and 35.72%, 39% and 35.44% reduction in switching energy for Double, Hex and Long interconnect segments, respectively, over the conventional one.