A low-power adder operating on effective dynamic data ranges

To design a power-efficient digital signal processor, this study develops a fundamental arithmetic unit of a low-power adder that operates on effective dynamic data ranges. Before performing an addition operation, the effective dynamic ranges of two input data are determined. Based on a larger effective dynamic range, only selected functional blocks of the adder are activated to generate the desired result while the input bits of the unused functional blocks remain in their previous states. The added result is then recovered to match the required word length. Using this approach to reduce switching operations of noneffective bits allows input data in 2's complement and sign magnitude representations to have similar switching activities. This investigation thus proposes a 2's complement adder with two master-stage and slave-stage flip-flops, a dynamic-range determination unit and a sign-extension unit, owing to the easy implementation of addition and subtraction in such a system. Furthermore, this adder has a minimum number of transistors addressed by carry-in bits and thus is designed to reduce the power consumption of its unused functional blocks. The dynamic range and sign-extension units are explored in detail to minimize their circuit area and power consumption. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed 32-bit adder can reduce power dissipation of conventional low-power adders for practical multimedia applications. Besides the ripple adder, the proposed approach can be utilized in other adder cells, such as carry lookahead and carry-select adders, to compromise complexity, speed and power consumption for application-specific integrated circuits and digital signal processors.     

Design of a single-ended energy efficient data-dependent-write-assist dynamic (DDWAD) SRAM cell for improved stability and reliability

A data-dependent write-assist dynamic (DDWAD) SRAM cell is proposed to reduce the power consumption and enhance the relaibility against process, voltage, temperature variation and aging effect under static stress. The cell has distinct read and write circuits with single bit line for respective operations which improve the read stability. In the cell, write operation is performed using separate write signal WS instead of wordline WL. The write signal WS is introduced to reduce the discharging actvity at the write bit line BL to reduce the dynamic power consumption. The latch property of the cell is disabled during write operation to flip the data faster at the storage nodes. The proposed design approach provides high immunity to the data-dependent bit line leakage and results in lower voltage drop on BL, lower leakage current and lower parasitic capacitance. The proposed cell consumes approximately 60.4 % lower write power and 52.8 % read power compared to the other cells. The storage node does not float during read operation and thus cell is not sensitive to any positive noise. The data in the cell can be maintained even if the power supply is reduced to 300 mV.     

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.     

A new extension method of retention time for memory cell on dynamic random access memory

Demands have been placed on dynamic random access memory (DRAM) to not only increase memory capacity and data transfer speed but also to reduce operating and standby currents. When a system uses DRAM, the restricted data retention time necessitates a refresh operation because each bit of the DRAM is stored as an amount of electrical charge in a storage capacitor. Power consumption for the refresh operation increases in proportion to memory capacity. A new method is proposed to reduce the refresh power consumption dynamically, when full memory capacity is not required, by effectively extending the memory cell retention time. Conversion from 1 cell/bit to 2^N cells/bit reduces the variation of retention times among memory cells. The proposed method reduces the frequency of disturbance and power consumption by two orders of magnitude. Furthermore, the conversion itself can be realized very simply from the structure of the DRAM array circuit, while maintaining all conventional functions and operations in the full array access mode.     

Low-Voltage Bootstrapped CMOS Drivers With Efficient Conditional Bootstrapping

In this paper, a set of low-voltage bootstrapped CMOS drivers are presented to reduce power consumption and improve switching speed for driving a large capacitive load. The proposed drivers can reduce the power consumption by making bootstrap operations conditional to input statistics. They also improve switching speed by providing larger bootstrap voltages for the same amount of integrated bootstrap capacitance as compared with conventional bootstrapped drivers. The proposed drivers were designed using 0.18- CMOS technology. The comparison results indicate that the proposed drivers achieve power savings up to 97% with 13%-22% improvements on switching speed as compared with the conventional design.     

A digital array based bit serial processor for arbitrary window size kernel convolution in vision sensors

The high speed and in-pixel processing of image data in smart vision sensors is an important solution for real time machine vision tasks. Diverse architectures have been presented for array based kernel convolution processing, many of which use analog processing elements to save space. In this paper a digital array based bit serial architecture is presented to perform certain image filtering tasks in the digital domain and hence gain higher accuracies than the analog methods. The presented method benefits from more diverse convolution options such as arbitrary size kernel windows, compared with the digital pulse based approaches. The proposed digital cell structure is compact enough to fit inside an image sensor pixel. When incorporated in a vision chip, resolutions of up to 12 bit accuracy can be obtained in kernel convolution functions with 35×28 μm² layout area usage per pixel in a 90 nm technology. Still, higher accuracies can be obtained with larger pixels. The power consumption of the approach is approximately 10 nW/pixel at a frame rate of 1 kfps.     

一种基于新型低功耗开关策略的10 bit 120 MS/s SAR ADC

设计了一种10 bit 120 MS/s高速低功耗逐次逼近模数转换器(SAR ADC)。针对功耗占比最大的CDAC模块,基于电容分裂技术并结合C-2C结构,提出了一种输出共模保持不变的双电平高能效开关控制策略;在降低CDAC开关功耗的同时,摆脱了CDAC开关过程中对中间共模电平的依赖,使得该结构适用于低电压工艺。在速度提升方面,控制逻辑使用异步逻辑进行加速;比较器采用一种全动态高速结构,在保证精度的前提下其工作频率达到3 GHz; CDAC中插入冗余位,以降低高位电容对充电时间的要求。所设计的SAR ADC使用40 nm CMOS工艺实现,采用1.1 V低电压供电。在不同工艺角下进行性能仿真,结果显示,在120 MHz采样率下,有效位数为9.86 bit,无杂散动态范围为72 dB,功耗为2.1 mW,优值为18.9 fJ/(conv·step)。     

Efficient RC low-power bus encoding methods for crosstalk reduction

In on-chip buses, the RC crosstalk effect leads to serious problems, such as wire propagation delay and dynamic power dissipation. This paper presents two efficient bus-coding methods. The proposed methods simultaneously reduce more dynamic power dissipation and wire propagation delay than existing bus encoding methods. Our methods also reduce more total power consumption than other encoding methods. Simulation results show that the proposed method I reduces coupling activity by 26.7-38.2% and switching activity by 3.7%-7% on 8-bit to 32-bit data buses, respectively. The proposed method II reduces coupling activity by 27.5-39.1% and switching activity by 5.3-9% on 8-bit to 32-bit data buses, respectively. Both the proposed methods reduce dynamic power by 23.9-35.3% on 8-bit to 32-bit data buses and total propagation delay by up to 30.7-44.6% on 32-bit data buses, and eliminate the Type-4 coupling. Our methods also reduce total power consumption by 23.6-33.9%, 23.9-34.3%, and 24.1-34.6% on 8-bit to 32-bit data buses with the 0.18, 0.13, and 0.09 μm technologies, respectively.     

电压倍增之像素设计

为了节省面板电路驱动芯片的功率损耗以及制作成本,本研究提出一种新的像素电路设计,而在设计中将会融合电荷泵电路。利用这种电路设计的像素可有效地将像素电极上的驱动电压提高到输入电压的2～3倍以上。此像素电路设计具有两个优势:第一,可以有效降低显示面板的像素功率损耗;第二,不需高电压的面板电路驱动芯片,因此可节省芯片的成本及功率损耗。由模拟结果可知,像素电极上的驱动电压确实可由此像素电路设计而提高到输入电压的2～3倍以上;而像素的功率损耗也可有效地降低,约为传统像素的1/2。     

Ultra-low-power capacitor-splitting switching algorithm with minus energy for SAR ADCs

In this letter, an ultra-low-power capacitor-splitting switching algorithm for successive approximation register analog-to-digital converters is proposed. To achieve low power, the first three bit cycles consume no power from the reference by introducing minus energy during the third bit cycle and proper switching algorithm. To further reduce the switching energy, only single-side capacitors are switched from the forth bit cycle. Besides, to add one bit, the dummy capacitor is realized by four unit capacitors and switched to generate the least significant bit. Compared to the Sanyal and Sun switching technique, the proposed capacitor switching method achieves 94.19% energy saving and 47.66% capacitor area reduction.     

Memory accesses reordering for interconnect power reduction in sum-of-products computations

Techniques for interconnect power consumption reduction in realizations of sum-of-products computations are presented. The proposed techniques reorder the sequence of accesses of the coefficient and data memories to minimize power-costly address and data bus bit switching. The reordering problem is systematically formulated by mapping into the traveling salesman's problem (TSP) for both single and multiple functional unit architectures. The cost function driving the memory accesses reordering procedure explicitly takes into consideration the static information related to algorithms' coefficients and storage addresses and data-related dynamic information. Experimental results from several typical digital signal-processing algorithms prove that the proposed techniques lead to significant bus switching activity savings. The power consumption in the data paths is reduced in most cases as well.     

一种基于频繁值和位变换感知的数据总线节能方法

深亚微米工艺下,片上数据总线能耗占嵌入式多核芯片能耗的比重越来越大.FV-MSB（Frequent Value-Most Significant Bits）方法降低了片外数据总线的能耗,但对于非频繁值和频繁高位值的低位部分未做处理,为进一步降低片上总线动态能耗,设计了一种基于频繁值和位变换感知的片上总线节能方法.利用频繁值和对位变换数的感知选择编码方式,大幅减少了数据总线上的位变换,有效降低了总线动态能耗.70nm工艺下,仿真实验结果显示,本文的方法最大节能比例可达17.76%,平均节能比例达16.91%,较FV-MSB方法使节能比例提高了6.28%.并且节能比例随λ的变化趋势表明本方法在未来工艺尺寸缩小时仍能发挥作用.     

LFSR Reseeding-Oriented Low-Power Test-Compression Architecture for Scan Designs

Massive test data volume and excessive test power consumption have become two strict challenges for very large scale integrated circuit testing. In BIST architecture, the unspecified bits are randomly filled by LFSR reseeding-based test compression scheme, which produces enormous switching activities during circuit testing, thereby causing high test power consumption for scan design. To solve the above thorny problem, LFSR reseeding-oriented low-power test-compression architecture is developed, and an optimized encoding algorithm is involved in conjunction with any LFSR-reseeding scheme to effectively reduce test storage and power consumption, it includes test cube-based block processing, dividing into hold partition sets and updating hold partition sets. The main contributions is to decrease logic transitions in scan chains and reduce specified bit in test cubes generated via LFSR reseeding. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves a high test compression efficiency than the existing methods while significantly reduces test power consumption with acceptable area overhead for most Benchmark circuits.     

一种低功耗2D DCT/IDCT处理器设计

设计了一种低功耗的2D DCT/IDCT处理器。为了降低功耗,设计基于行列分解的结构,采用了Loeffler的DCT/IDCT快速算法,并使用了零输入旁路、门控时钟、截断处理等技术,在满足设计需求的基础上降低了系统的功耗。常系数乘法器是该处理器的一个重要部件,文中基于并行乘法器结构设计了一种新型的低功耗常系数乘法器,它采用了CSD编码、Wallace Tree乘法算法,结合采用了截断处理、变数校正的优化技术,使得2D DCT/IDCT处理器整体性能有较大提高。设计的时钟频率为100 MHz,可以满足MPEG2 MP@HL实时解码的应用。采用SMIC0.18μm工艺进行综合,该2D DCT/IDCT处理器的面积为341 212μm2,功耗为14.971 mW。通过与其他结构的2DDCT/IDCT处理器设计分析与比较,在满足MPEG2 MP@HL实时解码应用的同时,实现了较低的功耗。     

Analysis and Design of Low-Cost Bit-Serial Architectures for Motion Estimation in H.264/AVC

Variable block-size motion estimation (VBSME) process occupies a major part of computation of an H.264 encoder, which is usually accelerated by bit-parallel hardware architectures with large I/O bit width to meet real-time constrains. However, such kind of architectures increase the area overhead and pin count, and therefore will not be suitable for area-constrained electronic consumer designs such as small portable multimedia devices. This paper addresses this problem by proposing two area efficient least significant bit (LSB) bit-serial architectures with small pin numbers. Both designs take advantage of data reusing technique in different ways for sum of absolute differences (SAD) computation and reading reference pixels, leading to a considerable reduction of memory bandwidth. The first architecture propagates the partial SAD and sum results and broadcasts the reference pixel rows whereas the second design reuse the SAD of small blocks and has a reconfigurable reference buffer leading to a better memory bandwidth when using hardware parallelism. The proposed designs benefit from several optimization techniques including an efficient serial absolute difference architecture, word length reduction by parallelism, bit truncation, mode filtering, and macroblock (MB) level subsampling, which significantly enhance their performances in terms of silicon area, throughput, latency, and power consumption. The first and second designs can support full search VBSME of 720?×?480 video with 30 frames per second (fps), two reference frames, and [?16, 15] search range at a clock frequency of 414 MHz with 29.28 k and 31.5 k gates, respectively.     

一种新型的SAR ADC电容阵列混合转换方案

针对逐次逼近寄存器型模数转换器(SAR ADC),提出了一种高能效的新型混合转换方案,将单调转换方式、拆分电容转换技术与一种新型电容转换方式相融合。在前三次比较周期内,新型混合转换方案SAR ADC的电容阵列不需要电源补充能量;在剩余的比较周期内使用单调转换方式,使转换能耗进一步降低。同时,新型混合转换方案在采用更少电容的情况下,获得与传统结构相同的转换精度。模型仿真结果表明,采用新型混合转换方案后,SAR ADC电容阵列的转换能耗较传统结构减少了99%。     

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 soft-switching mode rectifier with power factor correction andhigh frequency transformer link

This paper presents a soft-switching mode rectifier (SSMR) consisting of a power factor correction zero-voltage-transition-pulse-width-modulated (PFC ZVT-PWM) converter and a high-frequency transformer-coupled DC/DC zero voltage switching clamped voltage (ZVS-CV) converter. An easily implemented ZVT soft-switching mechanism is developed to reduce the switching losses and stresses of the power switches in the PFC ZVT-PWM converter. The operations of the proposed SSMR in various modes are analyzed in detail and the associated governed equations are derived. Then accordingly, a quantitative design procedure is developed to find the values of soft-switching circuit components. In the control aspect, the dynamic model of the SSMR is derived and a current waveform controller is designed, such that sinusoidal line current with low harmonics and near unity power factor is obtained. Under this condition, a voltage controller is also designed for yielding good DC output voltage control characteristics. Validity of the designed SSMR is verified experimentally     

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。     

基于粗粒度可重构阵列结构的多标准离散余弦变换设计

在视频信号的编解码流程中,离散余弦变换(DCT)是一个至关重要的环节,其决定了视频压缩的质量和效率。针对88尺寸的2维离散余弦变换,该文提出一种基于粗粒度可重构阵列结构(Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Array, CGRA)的硬件电路结构。利用粗粒度可重构阵列的可重配置的特性,实现在单一平台支持多个视频压缩编码标准的88 2维离散余弦变换。实验结果显示,这种结构每个时钟周期可以并行处理8个像素,吞吐率最高可达1.157109像素/s。与已有结构相比,设计效率和功耗效率最高可分别提升4.33倍和12.3倍,并能够以最高30帧/s的帧率解码尺寸为40962048,格式为4:2:0的视频序列。