In-memory designing of Delay and Toggle flip-flops utilizing Memristor Aided loGIC (MAGIC)

‘Computations inside Memory’ has become a latest area of research as ‘memory with computing skills’ accelerates the chances of developing ‘beyond-Von Neumann machines’, that is believed to be advantageous in terms of performance and energy-efficiency. ‘Memristors’ are considered as potential devices for building such memories, as they are highly dense, non-volatile scalable devices with faster switching times and lower energy dissipation and are also compatible with the existing CMOS-technology. Additionally, memristors fit in crossbar structure and can perform logic-computations, when different voltages are applied across them. Previously, various synthesis works have been reported for logic realization using memristors. But logic blocks, implemented using synthesis tools, are not always completely optimized. In this context, we present the alternative memristive-designs for the two most commonly used digital units—Delay (D) and Toggle (T) flip-flops. The proposed designs are based on Memristor Aided loGIC (MAGIC) design style and are specific to crossbar-based pure memristive-memories. A relevant simulation methodology is presented for simulating the proposed MAGIC-designs of D and T flip-flops in Cadence Virtuoso. Comparison with the existing designs of D, T flip-flops (using IMPLY) revealed that both the proposed D, T flip-flops are more performance-efficient (by 28.571%, 20% respectively) and more energy-efficient (by 83.873%, 82.905% respectively) than their corresponding IMPLY-peers. Also, the proposed D, T flip-flops are found to use reduced crossbar areas (by 46.667%, 45% respectively) relative to their counterparts generated using a recent synthesis technique, which makes the designs suitable for massive parallel executions inside memristive-memories of any size.     

一种基于忆阻器的可重配置逻辑电路

分析了具有阈值特性的双极性忆阻器模型的阈值电压和高低阻态开关特性,提出了一种基于该模型的可重配置逻辑电路。与基于忆阻器的蕴含逻辑门电路相比,可重配置逻辑电路具备逻辑运算的完备性,在实现“非”、“或”、“与”运算时,运算速度更快、功耗更低。仿真实验验证了电路逻辑功能的正确性,为设计运算速度更快、功耗更低的全加器和数选器等逻辑电路提供了参考。     

Low energy and area efficient quaternary multiplier with carbon nanotube field effect transistors

In this study, new multiplier and adder method designs with multiplexers are proposed. The designs are based on quaternary logic and a carbon nanotube field-effect transistor (CNTFET). The design utilizes 4 × 4 multiplier blocks. Applying specific rotational functions and unary operators to the quaternary logic reduced the power delay produced (PDP) circuit by 54% and 17.5% in the CNTFETs used in the adder block and by 98.4% and 43.62% in the transistors in the multiplier block, respectively. The proposed 4 × 4 multiplier also reduced the occupied area by 66.05% and increased the speed circuit by 55.59%. The proposed designs are simulated using HSPICE software and 32 nm technology in the Stanford Compact SPICE model for CNTFETs. The simulated results display a significant improvement in the fabrication, average power consumption, speed, and PDP compared to the current best-performing techniques in the literature. The proposed operators and circuits are evaluated under various operating conditions, and the results demonstrate the stability of the proposed circuits.     

Ultra-low-power carbon nanotube FET-based quaternary logic gates

This paper presents low-power carbon nanotube field-effect transistor (CNTFET)-based quaternary logic circuits. The proposed quaternary circuits are designed based on the CNTFET unique properties, such as the same carrier mobility for N- and P-type devices and also providing desirable threshold voltages by adopting proper diameters for the nanotubes. In addition, no paths exist between supply and ground rails in the steady states of the proposed designs, which eliminates the ON state static current and also the stacking technique is utilised in order to significantly reduce the leakage currents. The results of the simulations, conducted using Synopsys HSPICE with the standard 32 nm CNTFET technology, confirm the significantly lower power consumption, higher energy efficiency and lower sensitivity to process variation of the proposed designs compared to the state-of-the-art quaternary logic circuits. The proposed quaternary logic circuits have on average 92, 99 and 91% less total power, static power and PDP, respectively, compared with the most low-power and energy-efficient CNTFET-based quaternary logic circuits, recently presented in the literature.     

2.5 V 43–45 Gb/s CDR Circuit and 55 Gb/s PRBS Generator in SiGe Using a Low-Voltage Logic Family

An alternative design approach for implementing high-speed digital and mixed-signal circuits is proposed. It is based on a family of low-voltage logic gates with reduced transistor stacking compared to series-gated emitter-coupled logic. It includes a latch, an xor gate, and a MUX with mutually compatible interfaces. Topologies and characteristics of the individual gates are discussed. Closed-form propagation delay expressions are introduced and verified with simulations. The proposed design style was used to implement a 43–45 Gb/s CDR circuit with a 600MHz locking range and a 55 Gb/s PRBS generator with a$2^7!-!1$sequence length. The circuits were fabricated in a SiGe BiCMOS technology with$f _T = 120~hboxGHz$. Corresponding measurement results validate the proposed design style and establish it as a viable alternative to emitter-coupled logic in high-speed applications. Both circuits operate from a 2.5 V nominal power supply and consume 650 mW and 550 mW, respectively.     

A 4:1 Multiplexer using dual chirality CNTFET-based domino logic in nano-scale technology

ABSTRACT

This paper proposes a 4:1 Multiplexer (MUX) designed using proposed Dual Chirality High-Speed Noise Immune Domino Logic (DCHSNIDL) technique for designing lower delay noise immune domino logic circuits in Carbon Nanotube Field Effect Transistors (CNTFETs) technology. Dynamic power consumption, speed and noise immunity of the circuit are improved by changing the threshold voltage of the CNTFETs. The chirality indices of the carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are varied to change the threshold voltage of the CNTFETs. Simulations are carried out for 32 nm Stanford CNTFET model in HSPICE for 2-, 4-, 8- and 16-input domino OR gates at a clock frequency of 200 MHz on a DC supply voltage of 0.9V. The proposed DCHSNIDL domino circuit reduces power consumption by a maximum of 61.77% and propagation delay by a maximum of 55.11% compared to Current-Mirror Based Process Variation Tolerant (CPVT) circuit in CNTFET technology. The proposed CNTFET-based domino technique shows a maximum reduction of 96.31% in power consumption compared to its equivalent circuit in CMOS technology for a 4-input OR gate. The proposed technique shows an improvement of 1.04× to 1.35× times in Unity Noise Gain (UNG) compared to various existing techniques in CNTFET technology. The 4:1 MUX designed using proposed technique has 48.91% lower propagation delay and consumes 52.80% lower power compared to MUX using CPVT technique.     

Graphene nanoribbon crossbar architecture for low power and dense circuit implementations

Crossbar array is a promising nanoscale architecture which can be used for logic circuit implementation. In this work, a graphene nanoribbon (GNR) based crossbar architecture is proposed. This design uses parallel GNRs as device channel and metal as gate, source and drain contacts. Schottky-barrier type graphene nanoribbon field-effect transistors (SB-GNRFETs) are formed at the cross points of the GNRs and the metallic gates. Benchmark circuits are implemented using the proposed crossbar, Si-CMOS and multi-gate Si-CMOS approaches to evaluate the performance of the crossbar architecture compared to the conventional CMOS logic design. The compact SPICE model of SB-GNRFET was used to simulate crossbar-based circuits. The CMOS circuits are also simulated using 16 nm technology parameters. Simulation results of benchmark circuits using SIS synthesis tool indicate that the GNR-based crossbar circuits outperform conventional CMOS circuits in low power applications. Area optimized cell libraries are implemented based on the asymmetric crossbar architecture. The area of the circuit can be more reduced using this architecture at the expense of higher delay. The crossbar cells can be combined with CMOS cells to exhibit better performance in terms of EDP.     

Design and Evaluation of Adiabatic Arithmetic Units

Adiabatic design is an attractive approach to reducingenergy consumption in VLSI circuits after exhausting the potentialof conventional energy-saving techniques. Despite the plethoraof adiabatic logic architectures that have been proposed in recentyears, several practical considerations in the design of nontrivialadiabatic circuits remain largely unexplored. Moreover, it isstill unclear whether adiabatic circuits of significant sizeand complexity can achieve substantial savings in energy dissipationover corresponding conventional designs. We recently designedseveral low-power arithmetic units using a dual-rail adiabaticlogic design style. We also designed static CMOS versions ofthese units and compared their energy dissipation with theircorresponding adiabatic designs. In this paper we describe ourimplementations, discuss architecture and logic-level issuesrelated to our adiabatic designs, and present the findings ofour empirical comparison. Our results suggest that adiabaticlogic can be used for the implementation of relatively complexVLSI circuits that dissipate significantly less energy than theircorresponding CMOS designs.     

Novel Reversible Design of Advanced Encryption Standard Cryptographic Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

The quantum of power consumption in wireless sensor nodes plays a vital role in power management since more number of functional elements are integrated in a smaller space and operated at very high frequencies. In addition, the variations in the power consumption pave the way for power analysis attacks in which the attacker gains control of the secret parameters involved in the cryptographic implementation embedded in the wireless sensor nodes. Hence, a strong countermeasure is required to provide adequate security in these systems. Traditional digital logic gates are used to build the circuits in wireless sensor nodes and the primary reason for its power consumption is the absence of reversibility property in those gates. These irreversible logic gates consume power as heat due to the loss of per bit information. In order to minimize the power consumption and in turn to circumvent the issues related to power analysis attacks, reversible logic gates can be used in wireless sensor nodes. This shifts the focus from power-hungry irreversible gates to potentially powerful circuits based on controllable quantum systems. Reversible logic gates theoretically consume zero power and have accurate quantum circuit model for practical realization such as quantum computers and implementations based on quantum dot cellular automata. One of the key components in wireless sensor nodes is the cryptographic algorithm implementation which is used to secure the information collected by the sensor nodes. In this work, a novel reversible gate design of 128-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) cryptographic algorithm is presented. The complete structure of AES algorithm is designed by using combinational logic circuits and further they are mapped to reversible logic circuits. The proposed architectures make use of Toffoli family of reversible gates. The performance metrics such as gate count and quantum cost of the proposed designs are rigorously analyzed with respect to the existing designs and are properly tabulated. Our proposed reversible design of AES algorithm shows considerable improvements in the performance metrics when compared to existing designs.     

Design methodologies for high-performance noise-tolerant XOR-XNOR circuits

Scaling down to deep submicrometer (DSM) technology has made noise a metric of equal importance as compared to power, speed, and area. Smaller feature size, lower supply voltage, and higher frequency are some of the characteristics for DSM circuits that make them more vulnerable to noise. New designs and circuit techniques are required in order to achieve robustness in presence of noise. Novel methodologies for designing energy-efficient noise-tolerant exclusive-OR-exclusive- NOR circuits that can operate at low-supply voltages with good signal integrity and driving capability are proposed. The circuits designed, after applying the proposed methodologies, are characterized and compared with previously published circuits for reliability, speed and energy efficiency. To test the driving capability of the proposed circuits, they are embedded in an existing 5-2 compressor design. The average noise threshold energy (ANTE) is used for quantifying the noise immunity of the proposed circuits. Simulation results show that, compared with the best available circuit in literature, the proposed circuits exhibit better noise-immunity, lower power-delay product (PDP) and good driving capability. All of the proposed circuits prove to be faster and successfully work at all ranges of supply voltage starting from 3.3 V down to 0.6 V. The savings in the PDP range from 94% to 21% for the given supply voltage range respectively and the average improvement in the ANTE is 2.67X.     

A Kernel‐Based Partitioning Algorithm for Low‐Power,Low‐Area Overhead Circuit Design Using Don't‐Care Sets

This letter proposes an efficient kernel‐based partitioning algorithm for reducing area and power dissipation in combinational circuit designs using don't‐care sets. The proposed algorithm decreases power dissipation by partitioning a given circuit using a kernel extracted from the logic. The proposed algorithm also reduces the area overhead by minimizing duplicated gates in the partitioned sub‐circuits. The partitioned subcircuits are further optimized utilizing observability don't‐care sets. Experimental results for the MCNC benchmarks show that the proposed algorithm synthesizes circuits that on the average consume 22.5% less power and have 12.7% less area than circuits generated by previous algorithms based on a precomputation scheme.     

Introducing a technology index concept and optimum performance design procedure for single-electron-device based circuits

Single electron devices (SEDs) are utilized in designing many logic gates; however, in most cases the examination of the circuits is limited to a DC analysis that only indicates the correct performance of the circuits' logic function. This paper focuses mainly on the issue of optimization. In this regard, comparison of different designs is needed, but it is not possible to compare two different designs unless they both belong to a single technology or can be scaled to a same technology. So, we first introduce a technology index for SEDs, which allows meaningful comparisons between various designs of different technologies. Then, we describe a method for scaling these designs into a single identical technology, and clarifying the relations between the involved concepts. Using two examples, we explain an optimum design method for digital logic gates based on SEDs. Finally, the results of these two examples are presented and compared with the original designs. The comparison showed that all the three major performance features, including lower bit error rate, higher operation frequency, and higher temperature operation are improved in the proposed optimized design.     

A cellular automata guided two level obfuscation of Finite-State-Machine for IP protection

A popular countermeasure against IP piracy is to obfuscate the Finite State Machine (FSM) which is assumed to be the heart of a digital system. Most of the existing FSM obfuscation strategies rely on additionally introduced set of obfuscation mode state-transitions to protect the original state-transitions of the FSM. Although these methods assume that it is difficult to extract the FSM behavior from the flattened gate-level netlist, some recent reverse engineering attacks could successfully break the defense of these schemes. The capability of differentiating obfuscation mode state-transitions from normal mode state-transitions makes these attacks powerful. As a countermeasure against these attacks, we propose a new strategy that offers a key-based obfuscation to each state-transition of the FSM. We use a special class of non-group additive cellular automata (CA), called D1 1 CA, and it's counterpart D11CA_dual to obfuscate each state-transition of the FSM. Each state-transition has its own customized key, which must be configured correctly in order to get correct state-transition behavior from the synthesized FSM. A second layer of protection to the state-transition logic enhances the security of the proposed scheme. An in-depth security analysis of the proposed easily testable key-controlled FSM synthesis scheme demonstrates its ability to thwart the majority of the state-of-the-art attacks, such as FSM reverse engineering, SAT, and circuit unrolling attacks. Thus, the proposed scheme can be used for IP protection of the digital designs. Experimentations on various IWLS′93 benchmark FSM designs show that the average area, power, and delay overheads our proposed multi-bit key-based obfuscated FSM design are 56.43%, 6.87%, and 23.41% while considering the FSMs as standalone circuits. However, experimentation on the Amber23 processor core shows these overheads drastically reduce (reported area, power, and delay overheads values are 0.0025%, 0.44%, and 0%, respectively) while compared with respect to the entire design.     

Architectures for molecular electronic computers. I. Logicstructures and an adder designed from molecular electronic diodes

Recently, there have been significant advances in the fabrication and demonstration of individual molecular electronic wires and diode switches. This paper reviews those developments and shows how demonstrated molecular devices might be combined to design molecular-scale electronic digital computer logic. The design for the demonstrated rectifying molecular diode switches is refined and made more compatible with the demonstrated wires through the introduction of intramolecular dopant groups chemically bonded to modified molecular wires. Quantum mechanical calculations are performed to characterize some of the electrical properties of the proposed molecular diode switches. Explicit structural designs are displayed for AND, OR, and XOR gates that are built from molecular wires and molecular diode switches. The diode-based molecular electronic logic gates are combined to produce a design for a molecular-scale electronic half adder and a molecular-scale electronic full adder. These designs correspond to conductive monomolecular circuit structures that would be one million times smaller in area than the corresponding micron-scale digital logic circuits fabricated on conventional solid-state semiconductor computer chips. It appears likely that these nanometer-scale molecular electronic logic circuits could be fabricated and tested in the foreseeable future. At the very least, such molecular circuit designs constitute an exploration of the ultimate limits of electronic computer circuit miniaturization     

BiCMOS circuit technology for a 704 MHz ATM switch LSI

This paper describes BiCMOS level-converter circuits and clock circuits that increase VLSI interface speed to 1 GHz, and their application to a 704 MHz ATM switch LSI. An LSI with a high speed interface requires a BiCMOS multiplexer/demultiplexer (MUX/DEMUX) on the chip to reduce internal operation speed. A MUX/DEMUX with minimum power dissipation and a minimum pattern area can be designed using the proposed converter circuits. The converter circuits, using weakly cross-coupled CMOS inverters and a voltage regulator circuit, can convert signal levels between LCML and positive CMOS at a speed of 500 MHz. Data synchronization in the high speed region is ensured by a new BiCMOS clock circuit consisting of a pure ECL path and retiming circuits. The clock circuit reduces the chip latency fluctuation of the clock signal and absorbs the delay difference between the ECL clock and data through the CMOS circuits. A rerouting-Banyan (RRB) ATM switch, employing both the proposed converter circuits and the clock circuits, has been fabricated with 0.5 μm BiCMOS technology. The LSI, composed of CMOS 15 K gate logic, 8 Kb RAM, I Kb FIFO and ECL 1.6 K gate logic, achieved an operation speed of 704-MHz with power dissipation of 7.2 W     

Efficient logic architectures for CMOL nanoelectronic circuits

CMOS molecular (CMOL) circuits promise great opportunities for future hybrid nanoscale IC implementation. Two new CMOL building blocks using transmission gates have been introduced to obtain efficient combinational and sequential logic for CMOL designs. Compared with the existing CMOL circuits, the proposed CMOL designs based on these blocks can achieve more than 30% improvement in speed and up to 80% improvement in density and power consumption while providing similar fault tolerance capabilities. This work significantly advances the applications of CMOL to actual electronic circuits and systems     

Ultra-area-efficient reversible multiplier

One of the most promising technologies in designing low-power circuits is reversible computing. It is used in nanotechnology, quantum computing, quantum dot cellular automata (QCA), DNA computing, optical computing and in CMOS low-power designs. Because of this broad range of applications, extensive works have been proposed in constructing reversible gates and reversible circuits, including basic universal logic gates, adders and multipliers.In this paper we have highlighted the design of reversible multipliers and have presented two designs. Integration of adder circuit and multiplier in the design is described, in order to utilize the unused capacity of the multipliers.We have achieved reduction in quantum cost compared to similar designs as well as appending the adder circuit to the multiplier which leads to better usage of resources. Additionally, we have described the multiplier problem for implementing n×n reversible multiplier and analyzed the required resources in terms of n. Practical implementation of this design can be achieved with the existing technologies in CMOS and nanotechnology.Lastly, we make a tradeoff between area and time complexity to obtain two designs which can be used in different situations where different requirements are of different importances. We compare the proposed designs with each other and also to the existing ones.     

Online Testable Approaches in Reversible Logic

We present an overview and analysis of existing work in the design of online testable reversible logic circuits, as well as propose new approaches for the design of such circuits. We explain how previously proposed approaches are unnecessarily high in overhead and in many cases do not provide adequate fault coverage. Proofs of the correctness of our approaches are provided, and discussions of the advantages and disadvantages of each design approach are given. Experimental results comparing our approaches to existing work are presented as well. Both approaches that we propose have better fault coverage and significantly lower overheads than previous approaches.     

High-speed and low-cost carry select adders utilizing new optimized add-one circuit and multiplexer-based logic

In this paper, we propose some SQuare-RooT (SQRT) Carry SeLect Adder (CSLA) architectures including a high-speed design, a design with the lowest area compared to previous CSLAs, and two hybrid designs. The first proposed architecture is an optimized design of the Binary to Excess-1 Converter (BEC)-based CSLA by employing a new fast and merged add-one and multiplexing circuit. This architecture in addition to attaining much lower area, delay and energy consumption compared to the BEC CSLA, requires almost the same area compared to the best existing CSLA i.e. IRredundant Carry Generation and Selection scheme (IRCGS CSLA) while providing a higher speed. The second proposed CSLA as the lowest-area design is the area-optimized architecture of IRCGS CSLA that exploits a new logic optimization while maintaining its speed. This scheme makes use of a multiplexer-based logic to reduce the number of gates and to achieve a more compact design. In addition, two hybrid CSLAs are proposed by exploiting the benefits of both proposed CSLA architectures. Experimental results show that the hybrid CSLAs lead to lowest area-delay product and energy-delay product among all the proposed and previous designs in a wide range of 8-bit to 128-bit adder size. In fact, 10–48% reduction in area-delay product and 8–65% reduction in energy-delay product are achieved compared to previous designs. Moreover, the hybrid CSLAs outperform the best existing design with respect to all three parameters of area, delay and energy.     

Three novel single-stage full swing 3-input XOR

In this paper, three novel designs for single-stage, 3-input XOR logic cells are proposed. The design uses either Transmission Gate (TG) or Pass Transistor (PT) on similar topologies. The proposed circuits are area and power efficient because minimum-sized transistors are used in ratioless realisations. At the output, the designs give strong logic-levels. The topologies have minimised delay because the critical path consists of only three minimum-sized transistors. The delay estimation is presented. The circuits are simple and layouts are easy to build. Further, rail-to-rail voltage-swing at the output ensures good driving capability even at low voltages and at high frequencies ranging up to 10 GHz with minimum transistor count. The proposed designs and other existing candidate designs are simulated in a pragmatic condition on Cadence 90 nm CMOS technology at various supply voltages ranging from +0.8 V to +1.2 V. The simulation results illustrate that the proposed designs have comparable delay time to most candidate designs while it outperform all of them on total power consumption and PDP. As expected, the TG-based design reports best performance while the PT-based design follow as closed second with better component economy and control input overload. An application of the proposed XORs in ripple carry adders confirms the functionality of the cells in circuit implementation.