Technology mapping for high-performance static CMOS and passtransistor logic designs

Two new techniques for mapping circuits are proposed in this paper. The first method, called the odd-level transistor replacement (OTR) method, has a goal that is similar to that of technology mapping, but without the restriction of a fixed library size and maps a circuit to a virtual library of complex static CMOS gates. The second technique, the static CMOS/pass transistor logic (PTL) method, uses a mix of static CMOS and PTL to realize the circuit and utilizes the relation between PTL and binary decision diagrams. The methods are very efficient and can handle all of the ISCAS'85 benchmark circuits in minutes. A comparison of the results with traditional technology mapping using SIS on different libraries shows an average delay reduction above 18% for OTR, and an average delay reduction above 35% for the static CMOS/PTL method, with significant savings in the area     

BDD decomposition for delay oriented pass transistor logic synthesis

We address the problem of synthesizing pass transistor logic (PTL), with the specific objective of delay reduction, through binary decision diagram (BDD) decomposition. The decomposition is performed by mapping the BDD to a network flow graph, and then applying the max-flow min-cut technique to bipartition the BDD optimally under a cost function that measures the delay and area of the decomposed implementations. Experimental results obtained by running our algorithm on the set of ISCAS'85 benchmarks show a 31% improvement in delay and a 30% improvement in area, on an average, as compared to static CMOS implementations for XOR intensive circuits, while in case of arithmetic logic unit and control circuits that are NAND intensive, improvements over static CMOS are small and inconsistent.     

Low Area/Power Synthesis Using Hybrid Pass Transistor/CMOS Logic Cells in Standard Cell-Based Design Environment

This brief presents a logic synthesis flow that depends on the popular Synopsys Design Compiler to perform logic translation and minimization based on the standard cell library with both pass transistor logic (PTL) and CMOS logic cells. The hybrid PTL/CMOS logic synthesis can generate appropriate circuits considering various design constraints. The proposed multilevel PTL logic cells are automatically constructed from only a few basic cells. Postlayout simulations with UMC 90-nm technology are presented based on the standard cell library with pure PTL, pure CMOS, or hybrid PTL/CMOS cells. Experimental results show that, in most cases, pure PTL circuits have smaller area and power, whereas CMOS circuits, in general, have smaller delay.      

Design and investigation of gate-to-gate passive interconnections for SFQ logic circuits

We have developed a method of designing single-flux-quantum (SFQ) logic circuits with passive gate-to-gate interconnections. Based on our method, we designed a 2/spl times/2 switch in which all the interconnections are implemented with passive transmission lines (PTLs) while short Josephson transmission line (JTL) segments are used only to adjust the signal timings. Compared with an identical switch using JTL interconnections, the switch using PTL interconnections has 45% fewer wiring junctions and requires 48% less wiring power current. The switch operated at 40 GHz with a bias margin of /spl plusmn/9.5%.     

Wire Optimization and Delay Reduction for High‐Performance on‐Chip Interconnection in GALS Systems

To address the wire complexity problem in large‐scale globally asynchronous, locally synchronous systems, a current‐mode ternary encoding scheme was devised for a two‐phase asynchronous protocol. However, for data transmission through a very long wire, few studies have been conducted on reducing the long propagation delay in current‐mode circuits. Hence, this paper proposes a current steering logic (CSL) that is able to minimize the long delay for the devised current‐mode ternary encoding scheme. The CSL creates pulse signals that charge or discharge the output signal in advance for a short period of time, and as a result, helps prevent a slack in the current signals. The encoder and decoder circuits employing the CSL are implemented using 0.25‐μm CMOS technology. The results of an HSPICE simulation show that the normal and optimal mode operations of the CSL achieve a delay reduction of 11.8% and 28.1%, respectively, when compared to the original scheme for a 10‐mm wire. They also reduce the power‐delay product by 9.6% and 22.5%, respectively, at a data rate of 100 Mb/s for the same wire length.     

Minimal Energy Asynchronous Dynamic Adders

In battery-operated portable or implantable digital devices, where battery life needs to be maximized, it is necessary to minimize not only power consumption but also energy dissipation. Typical energy optimization measures include voltage reduction and operating at the slowest possible speed. We employ additional methods, including hybrid asynchronous dynamic design to enable operating over a wide range of battery voltage, aggregating large combinational logic blocks, and transistor sizing and reordering. We demonstrate the methods on simple adders, and discuss extension to other circuits. Three novel adders are proposed and analyzed: a 2-bit pass transistor logic (PTL) adder and two dynamic 2-bit adders. Circuit simulations on a 0.18-mum process at low voltage show that leakage energy is below 1%. The proposed adders achieve up to 40% energy savings relative to previously published results, while also operating faster     

基于保护门的纳米CMOS电路抗单粒子瞬态加固技术研究

随着器件特征尺寸的缩减,单粒子瞬态效应(SET)成为空间辐射环境中先进集成电路可靠性的主要威胁之一。基于保护门,提出了一种抗SET的加固单元。该加固单元不仅可以过滤组合逻辑电路传播的SET脉冲,而且因逻辑门的电气遮掩效应和电气隔离,可对SET脉冲产生衰减作用,进而减弱到达时序电路的SET脉冲。在45 nm工艺节点下,开展了电路的随机SET故障注入仿真分析。结果表明,与其他加固单元相比,所提出的加固单元的功耗时延积(PDP)尽管平均增加了17.42%,但容忍SET的最大脉冲宽度平均提高了113.65%,且时延平均降低了38.24%。     

A combined gate replacement and input vector control approach for leakage current reduction

Input vector control (IVC) is a popular technique for leakage power reduction. It utilizes the transistor stack effect in CMOS gates by applying a minimum leakage vector (MLV) to the primary inputs of combinational circuits during the standby mode. However, the IVC technique becomes less effective for circuits of large logic depth because the input vector at primary inputs has little impact on leakage of internal gates at high logic levels. In this paper, we propose a technique to overcome this limitation by replacing those internal gates in their worst leakage states by other library gates while maintaining the circuit's correct functionality during the active mode. This modification of the circuit does not require changes of the design flow, but it opens the door for further leakage reduction when the MLV is not effective. We then present a divide-and-conquer approach that integrates gate replacement, an optimal MLV searching algorithm for tree circuits, and a genetic algorithm to connect the tree circuits. Our experimental results on all the MCNC91 benchmark circuits reveal that 1) the gate replacement technique alone can achieve 10% leakage current reduction over the best known IVC methods with no delay penalty and little area increase; 2) the divide-and-conquer approach outperforms the best pure IVC method by 24% and the existing control point insertion method by 12%; and 3) compared with the leakage achieved by optimal MLV in small circuits, the gate replacement heuristic and the divide-and-conquer approach can reduce on average 13% and 17% leakage, respectively.     

Nanowire Crossbar Logic and Standard Cell-Based Integration

Nanowire crossbar is one of the most promising circuit solutions for nanoelectronics. However, it is still unclear whether or how they can be competitive in implementing logic circuits, as compared to their MOSFET counterparts. We analyze nanowire crossbars in area, speed, and power, in comparison with their MOSFET counterparts. We show nanowire crossbars do not scale well in terms of logic density and speed. To achieve performance close to their MOSFET counterparts, crossbar circuits need faster field-effect transistors (FETs) to compensate the high resistance of nanowires. Motivated by the analysis and comparative study, we propose a crossbar cells design based on judicious use of silicon nanowires. The crossbar cell is compatible with the conventional MOSFET fabrication and design methodologies, in particular, standard cell-based integrated circuit design. We evaluate logic circuits synthesized with crossbar cells and MOSFET cells based on the MCNC91 benchmark. The results show that crossbar cells can provide a density advantage of more than four times over the traditional MOSFET circuits with the same process technology, while achieving close performance and consuming less than one third power.      

A new true-single-phase-clocking BiCMOS dynamic pipelined logicfamily for high-speed, low-voltage pipelined system applications

New true-single-phase-clocking (TSPC) BiCMOS/BiNMOS/BiPMOS dynamic logic circuits and BiCMOS/BiNMOS dynamic latch logic circuits for high-speed dynamic pipelined system applications are proposed and analyzed. In the proposed circuits, the bootstrapping technique is utilized to achieve fast near-full-swing operation. The circuit performance of the proposed new dynamic logic circuits and dynamic latch logic circuits in both domino and pipelined applications are simulated by using HSPICE with 1 μm BiCMOS technology. Simulation results have shown that the new dynamic logic circuits and dynamic latch logic circuits in both domino and pipelined applications have better speed performance than that of CMOS and other BiCMOS dynamic logic circuits as the supply voltage is scaled down to 2 V. The operating frequency and power dissipation/MHz of the pipelined system, which is constructed by the new clock-high-evaluate-BiCMOS dynamic latch logic circuit and clock-low-evaluate-BiCMOS (BiNMOS) dynamic latch logic circuit, and the logic units with two stacked MOS transistors, are about 2.36 (2.2) times and 1.15 (1.1) times those of the CMOS TSPC dynamic logic under 1.5-pF output loading at 2 V, respectively. Moreover, the chip area of these two BiCMOS pipelined systems is about 1.9 times and 1.7 times as compared with that of the CMOS TSPC pipelined system. A two-input dynamic AND gate fabricated with 1 μm BiCMOS technology verifies the speed advantage of the new BiNMOS dynamic logic circuit. Due to the excellent circuit performance in high-speed, low-voltage operation, the proposed new dynamic logic circuits and dynamic latch logic circuits are feasible for high-speed, low-voltage dynamic pipelined system applications     

The Triptych FPGA architecture

Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are an important implementation medium for digital logic. Unfortunately, they currently suffer from poor silicon area utilization due to routing constraints. In this paper we present Triptych, an FPGA architecture designed to achieve improved logic density with competitive performance. This is done by allowing a per-mapping tradeoff between logic and routing resources, and with a routing scheme designed to match the structure of typical circuits. We show that, using manual placement, this architecture yields a logic density improvement of up to a factor of 3.5 over commercial FPGAs, with comparable performance. We also describe Montage, the first FPGA architecture to fully support asynchronous and synchronous interface circuits     

Soft error generation analysis in combinational logic circuits

Reliability is expected to become a big concern in future deep sub-micron integrated circuits design.Soft error rate(SER) of combinational logic is considered to be a great reliability problem.Previous SER analysis and models indicated that glitch width has a great impact on electrical masking and latch window masking effects,but they failed to achieve enough insights.In this paper,an analytical glitch generation model is proposed.This model shows that after an inflexion point the collected charge has an...     

组合逻辑电路中的软错误（Soft Error）生成模型的分析

在深亚微米集成电路设计领域,电路可靠性问题日益严重。这个问题的一个重要方面是组合逻辑电路的软错误。现有的关于软错误率的分析和模型表明电压脉冲宽度对电气掩蔽（Electrical Masking）以及锁存窗掩蔽（Latch Window Masking）两种效应都有很大的影响。电压脉冲的宽度通过影响这两种效应进而决定了电路的软错误率。但是这些分析和模型在这个问题上不够深入。在这篇文章中,我们首次提出一个脉冲生成的解析模型。这个模型表明,越过一个拐点后,电路中由射线粒子注入的电荷量同电压脉冲宽度之间存在指数关系。这个模型的平均误差约为2.6%。这个模型还揭示了逻辑门延时与软错误率之间的折中关系。这个关系是最近的一篇有关组合逻辑电路软错误率降低方法的论文的基础[19]。     

Computation of the average and harmonic noise power-spectral density in switched-capacitor circuits

Switched-capacitor (SC) circuits are periodically time-varying circuits and the noise at the output of these circuits is cyclostationary. This noise is therefore characterized by the average and harmonic spectral densities. We extend the method proposed in a previous paper to compute the average and harmonic noise-spectral densities in periodically varying circuits. We derive expressions for the average and harmonic spectral densities and use the mixed-frequency-time technique for the computation. The results for the average spectral density are compared with published results. The contribution of the harmonic spectral densities to the average noise-spectral density at the output of a cascaded block is estimated.     

A Novel Charge Recycling Design Scheme Based on Adiabatic Charge Pump

Power consumption has become a critical design criterion for integrated circuits given the growing importance of portable battery-operated devices. A typical CMOS gate driven by power supply (V_DD), draws energy equal to C_LV_DD ² during every cycle of operation. We propose a new approach to recycle the charge with an adiabatic charge pump that moves the slower adiabatic components away from the critical path of logic. The critical path of the system, and hence the delay, do not change. This is achieved by overlapping the adiabatic charge pump delays with the computing path logic delays. Many embedded high performance applications such as digital signal processing (DSP), which exhibit datapath parallelism, are ideal candidates for this scheme. The proposed method has been implemented in DSP computations. SPICE simulations-based results indicate that the proposed scheme reduces energy consumption in these DSP circuits by as much as 18% (on average 9.94%) with no perceptible loss in performance. The area penalty for these energy savings are in the 1%-2% range, The leakage energy reduction in 45-nm BPTM averages 46%.     

A Comprehensive Delay Model for CMOS CML Circuits

MOS-transistor-based current-mode logic (CML)-type (MCML) circuits in high-speed circuit applications often operate as low-swing analog circuits rather than fully switched digital circuits. At these high-speed operations, the effect of the finite input signal slope on the delay of MCML gates significantly increases mainly due to incomplete current steering. Hence, for such cases, the conventional RC delay model which is based on ideal step input assumption fails to track the delay of MCML circuits with errors as high as 40% when a design is optimized for high-speed. In this paper, a comprehensive delay model is proposed that accurately predicts the delay of MCML circuits for all types of operation from low-speed and fully switched to high-speed and low-swing applications by including the input slope effect (ISE) into the conventional RC delay model. Furthermore, the proposed model is extended to multilevel complex logic gates without losing the general RC delay model format. Theoretical results are compared with Spice simulations in a 0.13-$mu{hbox {m}}$ CMOS technology. Results show that the error in delay of the proposed model is less than 20% for all practical designs. The proposed model is still sufficiently tractable to be use in back-of-envelope calculations that achieve close-to-optimum solutions without running extensive parametric simulations. In addition to the achieved accuracy and preserved simplicity, the proposed model enhances the intuitive understanding of MCML gates that simple RC delay model fails to provide.      

A 1.3-GHz fifth-generation SPARC64 microprocessor

A fifth-generation SPARC64 processor is fabricated in 130-nm partially depleted silicon-on-insulator CMOS with eight layers of Cu metallization. At V/sub dd/ = 1.2 V and T/sub a/ = 25/spl deg/C, it runs at 1.3 GHz and dissipates 34.7 W. The chip contains 191 M transistors with 19 M logic circuits in an area of 18.14 mm /spl times/ 15.99 mm and is covered with 5858 bumps, of which 269 are for I/O signals. It is mounted in a 1360-pin land-grid-array package. The 16-byte-wide system bus operates with a 260-MHz clock in single-data-rate or double-data-rate modes. This processor implements an error-detection mechanism for execution units and data path logic circuits in addition to on-chip arrays to detect data corruption. Intermittent errors detected in execution units and data paths are recovered via instruction retry. A soft barrier clocking scheme allows amortization of the clock skew and jitter over multiple cycles and helps to achieve high clock frequency. Tunability of the clock timing makes timing closure easier. A relatively small amount of custom circuit design and the use of mostly static circuits contributes to achieve short development time.     

三值钟控绝热静态随机存储器设计

通过对多值逻辑、绝热电路和三值SRAM结构的研究,提出一种新颖的三值钟控绝热静态随机存储器(SRAM)的设计方案。该方案利用NMOS管的自举效应,以绝热方式对SRAM的行列地址译码器、存储单元、敏感放大器等进行充放电,有效恢复储存在字线、位线、行列地址译码器等大开关电容上的电荷,实现三值信号的读出写入和能量回收。PSPICE模拟结果表明,所设计的三值钟控绝热SRAM具有正确的逻辑功能和低功耗特性,在相同的参数和输入信号情况下,与三值常规SRAM相比,节约功耗达68%。     

Characteristics of driver and receiver circuits with a passivetransmission line in RSFQ circuits

We report simulated results of-rapid single flux quantum (SFQ) circuits having driver, receiver, and passive transmission lines for propagating SFQ pulses to investigate the design criteria. We have studied the equivalent input/output resistance of the driver/receiver in various bias conditions and found that the resistance is almost proportional to the bias current of the driver/receiver. Furthermore, we have proposed inserting a series resistor at the end of the superconducting passive transmission line (PTL) for avoiding undesirable flux trapping in the loop and for isolation in regard to the DC current. We also found that the reduction of the bias margin due to the resistance is rather small when the resistance is much smaller than the impedance of the PTL. An operating margin of more than 30% was obtained in the driver/receiver circuits including the PTL and the series resistor     

Diode-footed domino: a leakage-tolerant high fan-in dynamic circuit design style

A leakage-tolerant design technique for high fan-in dynamic logic circuits is presented. An NMOS transistor with gate and drain terminals tied together (diode) is added in series with the evaluation network of standard domino circuits. Due to the stacking effect, the leakage of the evaluation path significantly decreases, thereby improving the robustness of the circuit against deep-submicron subthreshold leakage and input noise. To improve the speed of the circuit, a current mirror is also employed in the evaluation network to increase the evaluation current. The proposed technique (diode-footed domino) exhibits considerable improvement in leakage and noise immunity as compared to the standard domino circuits. Simulation results of wide fan-in gates designed using Berkeley Predictive Technology Models of 70-nm technology demonstrate at least 1.9/spl times/ noise-immunity improvement at the same delay compared to the standard domino circuits. Dynamic comparators and multiplexers are designed using the diode-footed domino and conventional techniques to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in improving leakage-tolerance and performance of high fan-in circuits.