Pass transistor with dual threshold voltage domino logic design using standby switch for reduced subthreshold leakage current

Dual threshold voltages domino design methodology utilizes low threshold voltages for all transistors that can switch during the evaluate mode and utilizes high threshold voltages for all transistors that can switch during the precharge modes. We employed standby switch can strongly turn off all of the high threshold voltage transistors which enhances the effectiveness of a dual threshold voltage CMOS technology to reduce the subthreshold leakage current. Subthreshold leakage currents are especially important in burst mode type integrated circuits where the majority of the time for system is in an idle mode. The standby switch allowed a domino system enters and leaves a low leakage standby mode within a single clock cycle. In addition, we combined domino dynamic circuits style with pass transistor XNOR and CMOS NAND gates to realize logic 1 output during its precharge phase, but not affects circuits operation in its evaluation and standby phase. The first stage NAND gates output logic 1 can guarantee the second stage computation its correct logic function when system is in a cascaded operation mode. The processing required for dual threshold voltage circuit configuration is to provide an extra threshold voltage involves only an additional implant processing step, but performs lower dynamic power consumption, lower delay and high fan-out, high switching frequencies circuits characteristics. SPICE simulation for our proposed circuits were made using a 0.18 µm CMOS process from TSMC, with 10 fF capacitive loads in all output nodes, using the parameters for typical process corner at 25 °C, the simulation results demonstrated that our designed 8-bit carry look-ahead adders reduced chip area, power consumption and propagation delay time more than 40%, 45% and around 20%, respectively. Wafer based our design were fabricated and measured, the measured data were listed and compared with simulation data and prior works. SPICE simulation also manifested lower sensitivity of our design to power supply, temperature, capacitive load and process variations than the dynamic CMOS technologies.     

Delay and power monitoring schemes for minimizing power consumption by means of supply and threshold voltage control in active and standby modes

This paper describes newly developed delay and power monitoring schemes for minimizing power consumption by means of the dynamic control of supply voltage V/sub DD/ and threshold voltage V/sub TH/ in active and standby modes. In the active mode, on the basis of delay monitoring results, either VDD control or VTH control is selected to avoid any oscillation problem between them. In V/sub DD/ control, on the basis of delay monitoring results, VDD is adjusted so as to be maintained at the minimum value at which the chip is able to operate for a given clock frequency. In V/sub TH/ control, on the basis of power monitoring results, VTH is adjusted so as to maintain a certain switching current I/sub SW//leakage current I/sub LEAK/ ratio known to indicate minimum power consumption. In the standby mode, the precision of power monitoring (which detects optimum body bias by comparing subthreshold current I/sub SUBTH/ to substrate current I/sub SUB/) is improved by taking into consideration both the effects of lowering V/sub DD/ and the effects of the presence of gate-oxide leakage current. Experimental results with a 90-nm CMOS device indicate that use of the proposed power monitoring results in the successful minimizing of power consumption. It does so by making it possible to: 1) maintain the I/sub SW//ILEAK ratio in the active mode and 2) detect optimum body bias conditions (I/sub SUBTH/=ISUB) within an error of less than 20% with respect to actual minimum leakage current values in the standby mode.     

Sleep switch dual threshold voltage domino logic with reduced subthreshold and gate oxide leakage current

A circuit technique is proposed in this paper for simultaneously reducing the subthreshold and gate oxide leakage power consumption in domino logic circuits. PMOS-only sleep transistors and a dual threshold voltage CMOS technology are utilized to place an idle domino logic circuit into a low leakage state. Sleep transistors are added to the dynamic nodes in order to reduce the subthreshold leakage current by strongly turning off all of the high threshold voltage transistors. Similarly, the sleep switches added to the output nodes suppress the voltages across the gate insulating layers of the transistors in the fan-out gates, thereby minimizing the gate tunneling current. The proposed circuit technique lowers the total leakage power by 88 to 97% as compared to the standard dual threshold voltage domino logic circuits. Similarly, a 22 to 44% reduction in the total leakage power is observed as compared to a previously published sleep switch scheme in a 45 nm CMOS technology.     

INDEP approach for leakage reduction in nanoscale CMOS circuits

Complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology scaling for improving speed and functionality turns leakage power one of the major concerns for nanoscale circuits design. The minimization of leakage power is a rising challenge for the design of the existing and future nanoscale CMOS circuits. This paper presents a novel, input-dependent, transistor-level, low leakage and reliable INput DEPendent (INDEP) approach for nanoscale CMOS circuits. INDEP approach is based on Boolean logic calculations for the input signals of the extra inserted transistors within the logic circuit. The gate terminals of extra inserted transistors depend on the primary input combinations of the logic circuits. The appropriate selection of input gate voltages of INDEP transistors are reducing the leakage current efficiently along with rail to rail output voltage swing. The important characteristic of INDEP approach is that it works well in both active as well as standby modes of the circuits. This approach overcomes the limitations created by the prevalent current leakage reduction techniques. The simulation results indicate that INDEP approach mitigates 41.6% and 35% leakage power for 1-bit full adder and ISCAS-85 c17 benchmark circuit, respectively, at 32 nm bulk CMOS technology node.     

A super cut-off CMOS (SCCMOS) scheme for 0.5-V supply voltage withpicoampere stand-by current

A super cut-off CMOS (SCCMOS) scheme is proposed and demonstrated by measurement to achieve high-speed and low stand-by current CMOS VLSIs in sub-1-V supply voltage regime. By overdriving the gate of a cut-off MOSFET, the SCCMOS suppresses leakage current below 1 pA per logic gate in a stand-by mode while high-speed operation in an active mode is possible with low-threshold voltage of 0.1-0.2 V. The SCCMOS pushes the low-voltage operation limit 0.2 V further down compared with conventional schemes while maintaining the same stand-by current level     

亚65nm工艺新型p结构多米诺与门设计

利用休眠晶体管、多阈值和SEFG技术(源跟随求值门技术),设计了一种新型的p结构多米诺与门.HSPICE仿真结果表明,在相同的时间延迟下,与标准双阈值多米诺与门、标准低阈值多米诺与门和SEFG结构相比,提出的新型多米诺与门的漏电流分别减小了43%,62%和67%,噪声容限分别增大了3.4%,23.6%和13.7%.从而有效地解决了亚65nm工艺下多米诺与门存在的漏电流过大,易受干扰的问题.分析并得到了不同结构的休眠多米诺与门的漏电流最低的输入矢量和时钟状态.     

A leakage reduction methodology for distributed MTCMOS

Multithreshold CMOS (MTCMOS) circuits reduce standby leakage power with low delay overhead. Most MTCMOS designs cut off the power to large blocks of logic using large sleep transistors. Locally distributing sleep devices has remained less popular even though it has several advantages described in this paper. However, locally placed sleep devices are only feasible if sneak leakage currents are prevented. This paper makes two contributions to leakage reduction. First, we examine the causes of sneak leakage paths and propose a design methodology that enables local insertion of sleep devices for sequential and combinational circuits. A set of design rules allows designers to prevent most sneak leakage paths. A fabricated 0.13-/spl mu/m, dual V/sub T/ test chip employs our methodology to implement a low-power FPGA architecture with gate-level sleep FETs and over 8/spl times/ measured standby current reduction. Second, we describe the implementation and benefits of local sleep regions in our design and examine the interfacing issues for this technique. Local sleep regions reduce leakage in unused circuit components at a local level while the surrounding circuits remain active. Measured results show that local sleep regions reduce leakage in active configurable logic blocks (CLBs) on our chip by up to 2.2/spl times/ (measured) based on configuration.     

New insulated-gate inverted structure AlGaAs/GaAs/n-AlGaAs HEMT ring oscillator

Inverted-structure high electron mobility transistors with insulated-gate structure, i.e. AlGaAs/GaAs/n-AlGaAs, have been successfully applied to E/D-type DCFL ring oscillators. High transconductance of 280 mS/mm was obtained at 77 K in an enhancement-mode FET with 0.8 ?m gate length. Gate leakage current was small enough even at a gate voltage of +1.4 V both at 300 K and 77 K, and a high logic swing of more than 1 V was achieved using a DCFL inverter. A 21-stage ring oscillator showed a minimum gate delay as small as 18.0 ps with power dissipation of 520 ?W/gate at 77 K.     

PVT variations aware low leakage INDEP approach for nanoscale CMOS circuits

Increasing in device parameter variations is the critical issue in very deep sub-micron regime due to continue scaling of the transistor dimensions. The overall performance yield of the logic circuit is diminished by raising leakage current and variability issues in scaled devices. In this article; we have proposed an approach called INDEP, based on Boolean logic calculation for the input signals of the extra inserted transistors between the pull-up and pull-down network of the CMOS logic. INDEP approach is not only reduces the leakage current but also mitigates the variability issues with minimum susceptible delay paths. Various process, voltage and temperature (PVT) variations are analyzed at 22 nm BSIM4 bulk CMOS PTM technology node for chain of 5-inverters using HSPICE tool. Several guidelines are provided to design the variability aware CMOS circuits in nanoscale regime by considering the leakage current variation. INDEP approach works effectively in both active as well as standby state of the circuit and keeping the modal performance characteristics of the CMOS gate. The electrical simulation results show that our proposed INDEP approach is less susceptible to PVT variations as compared to conventional circuit. The Monte-Carlo simulation results confirm that average INDEP leakage current reduction is 62.31% at ±20% PVT variations under 3σ Gaussian distribution for chain of 5-inverters.     

8 Gb/s 8:1 multiplexer and 1:8 demultiplexer IC's using GaAs DCFLcircuit

High-speed 8:1 multiplexer and 1:8 demultiplexer ICs composed of GaAs direct-coupled FET logic (DCFL) have been designed and fabricated. The ICs were designed with a tree-type architecture and using memory-cell-type flip-flops (MCFFs). Self-aligned GaAs MESFETs with a gate length of 0.5 μm were used in these ICs. The propagation delay time of the DCFL inverter was 19.0 ps/gate. Both ICs operated up to 8 Gb/s with power dissipations of 1.5 W for the multiplexer and 1.9 W for the demultiplexer at a single power supply voltage of 2.0 V. These ICs are applicable for multigigabit lightwave communication systems     

A 1-V, 10-MHz, 3.5-mW, 1-Mb MTCMOS SRAM: with charge-recyclinginput/output buffers

This paper presents a high-speed and low-power SRAM for portable equipment, which is operated by a single battery cell of around 1 V. Its memory cells are made up of high-threshold-voltage (high-V_th) MOSFETs in order to suppress the power dissipation due to large subthreshold leakage currents. For designing peripheral circuitry, we use SRAM's special feature that input signals of each logic gate during the standby time can be predicted. Low-V_th MOSFETs are assigned for the critical paths of memory-cell access. The leakage current in each logic gate is reduced by high-V_th MOSFETs, which are cut off during standby. The high-V_th, MOSFET in one logic gate can be shared with another logic gate in order to enlarge effective channel width. To shorten the readout time, a step-down boosted-wordline scheme suitable for current-sense readout and a new half-swing bidirectional double-rail bus are used. The data-writing time is halved by means of a pulse-reset wordline architecture. To reduce the power dissipation, a 32-divided memory array structure is employed with a new redundant address-decoding scheme. Also, data transition detectors and a charge-recycling technique are employed for reducing the power dissipation of data-I/O buffers. A 64-K-words×16-bits SRAM test chip, which was fabricated with a 0.5-μm multithreshold voltage CMOS (MTCMOS) process, has demonstrated a 75-ns address access time at a 1-V power supply. The power dissipation during standby is 1.2 μW, and that at a 10-MHz read operation with the modified checkerboard test pattern is 3.9 mW for 30-pF loads     

Dynamic exclusive-OR gate based on gate-induced Si islandsingle-electron transistor

Basic operation of a dynamic exclusive-OR gate implemented by a field effect transistor and a single-electron transistor is experimentally demonstrated, for the first time. Logic output voltage shows full swing operation at a supply voltage of 20 mV. Fabricated single-electron transistors are advantageous for implementing a multi-gate single-electron logic circuit     

A high-speed, low-power bipolar digital circuit for Gb/s LSI's:current mirror control logic

A novel low-power bipolar circuit for Gb/s LSIs, current mirror control logic (CMCL), is described. To reduce supply voltage and currents, the current sources of emitter-coupled-logic (ECL) series gate circuits are removed and the lower differential pairs are controlled by current mirror circuits. This enables circuits with the same function as two-stacked ECL circuits to operate at supply voltage of -2.0 V and reduces the current drawn through the driving circuits for the differential pairs to 50% of the conventional level shift circuits (emitter followers) in ECL. This CMCL circuit achieves 3.1-Gb/s (D-FF) and 4.3-GHz (T-FF) operation with a power supply voltage of -2.0 V and power dissipation of only 1.8 mW/(FF)     

1-V power supply high-speed digital circuit technology withmultithreshold-voltage CMOS

1-V power supply high-speed low-power digital circuit technology with 0.5-μm multithreshold-voltage CMOS (MTCMOS) is proposed. This technology features both low-threshold voltage and high-threshold voltage MOSFET's in a single LSI. The low-threshold voltage MOSFET's enhance speed performance at a low supply voltage of 1 V or less, while the high-threshold voltage MOSFET's suppress the stand-by leakage current during the sleep period. This technology has brought about logic gate characteristics of a 1.7-ns propagation delay time and 0.3-μW/MHz/gate power dissipation with a standard load. In addition, an MTCMOS standard cell library has been developed so that conventional CAD tools can be used to lay out low-voltage LSI's. To demonstrate MTCMOS's effectiveness, a PLL LSI based on standard cells was designed as a carrying vehicle. 18-MHz operation at 1 V was achieved using a 0.5-μm CMOS process     

PMOS-Only Sleep Switch Dual-Threshold Voltage Domino Logic in Sub-65-nm CMOS Technologies

A circuit technique is proposed in this paper for simultaneously reducing the subthreshold and gate oxide leakage power consumption in domino logic circuits. Only p-channel sleep transistors and a dual-threshold voltage CMOS technology are utilized to place an idle domino logic circuit into a low leakage state. Sleep transistors are added to the dynamic nodes in order to reduce the subthreshold leakage current by strongly turning off all of the high-threshold voltage transistors. Similarly, the sleep switches added to the output nodes suppress the voltages across the gate insulating layers of the transistors in the fan-out gates, thereby minimizing the gate tunneling current. The proposed circuit technique lowers the total leakage power by up to 77% and 97% as compared to the standard dual-threshold voltage domino logic circuits at the high and low die temperatures, respectively. Similarly, a 22% to 44% reduction in the total leakage power is observed as compared to a previously published sleep switch scheme in a 45-nm CMOS technology. The energy overhead of the circuit technique is low, justifying the activation of the proposed sleep scheme by providing a net savings in total energy consumption during short idle periods.     

一种全nMOS SOI晶体管4管静态存储器单元

提出了一种新颖的无负载4管全部由nMOS管组成的随机静态存储器(SRAM)单元.该SRAM单元基于32nm绝缘体上硅(SOI)工艺结点,它包含有两个存取管和两个下拉管. 存取管的沟道长度小于下拉管的沟道长度. 由于小尺寸MOS管的短沟道效应,在关闭状态时存取管具有远大于下拉管的漏电流,从而使SRAM单元在保持状态下可以维持逻辑“1" . 存储节点的电压还被反馈到存取管的背栅上,使SRAM单元具有稳定的“读”操作. 背栅反馈同时增强了SRAM单元的静态噪声容限(SNM). 该单元比传统的6管SRAM单元和4管SRAM单元具有更小的面积. 对SRAM单元的读写速度和功耗做了仿真和讨论. 该SRAM单元可以工作在0.5V电源电压下.     

Lateral and Vertical Scaling of $hbox{In}_{0.7} hbox{Ga}_{0.3}hbox{As}$ HEMTs for Post-Si-CMOS Logic Applications

In this paper, we have experimentally investigated the impact of lateral and vertical scaling of In_0.7Ga_0.3As high-electron-mobility transistors (HEMTs) onto their logic performance. We have found that reducing the In_0.52Al_0.48As insulator thickness results in much better electrostatic integrity and improved short-channel behavior down to a gate length of around 60 nm. Our nearly enhancement-mode 60-nm HEMTs feature V_T = -0.02 V, DIBL = 93 mV/V, S = 88 mV/V, and I_ON/I_OFF = 1.6 times10⁴, at V _DD = 0.5 V. We also estimate a gate delay of CV/I = 1.6 ps at V_DD = 0.5 V. We have benchmarked these devices against state-of-the-art Si CMOS. For the same leakage current, which includes the gate leakage current, the InGaAs HEMTs exhibit 1.2times more current drive (I_ON) than the state-of-the-art 65-nm low-power CMOS technology at V _DD = 0.5 V.     

High-voltage-tolerant I/O buffers with low-voltage CMOS process

This paper presents high-voltage-tolerant I/O buffer designs for a 1.9-V external cache interface and a 3.3-V system interface using 1.9-V MOS transistors in a 0.21-μm process with 40-Å gate-oxide thickness. Various circuit techniques are used for 1.9- and 3.3-V I/O buffers to ensure that the voltage across the gate oxide of every MOS element is below specified limits of 2.2 V for transient (short duty cycle) and 1.9 V for steady state. Only one PMOS pullup driver transistor between the bond pad and the power supply, and one NMOS pulldown driver transistor between the bond pad and ground, are used for the 1.9-V I/O buffer design, while cascoded MOS transistors between the bond pad and power supply or ground terminals are used for the 3.3-V I/O buffer design. The primary design goal is to ensure the reliability of MOS elements by avoiding excessive gate oxide stress due to high electric fields. However, due to differences in requirements for speed, power-supply voltage, and tristate leakage current, completely different circuit techniques have been used for the two designs. Both of the designs have been successfully implemented in a 400-MHz UltraSPARC microprocessor     

A dual Vt disturb-free subthreshold SRAM with write-assist and read isolation

This paper presents a new dual Vt 8T SRAM cell having single bit-line read and write,in addition to Write Assist and Read Isolation (WARI).Also a faster write back scheme is proposed for the half selected cells.A high Vt device is used for interrupting the supply to one of the inverters for weakening the feedback loop for assisted write.The proposed cell provides an improved read static noise margin (RSNM) due to the bit-line isolation during the read.Static noise margins for data read (RSNM),write (WSNM),read delay,write delay,data retention voltage (DRV),leakage and average powers have been calculated.The proposed cell was found to operate properly at a supply voltage as small as 0.41 V.A new write back scheme has been suggested for half-selected cells,which uses a single NMOS access device and provides reduced delay,pulse timing hardware requirements and power consumption.The proposed new WARI 8T cell shows better performance in terms of easier write,improved read noise margin,reduced leakage power,and less delay as compared to the existing schemes that have been available so far.It was also observed that with proper adjustment of the cell ratio the supply voltage can further be reduced to 0.2 V.     

A standby current limited performance figure of merit for deepsub-micron CMOS

The delay time of an inverter or NAND chain at a gate length yielding equal standby current and active current is used as the definition of a maximum Figure of Merit (FOM), FOM_max. The circuit power that occurs under this condition of equal standby and active currents is an equally important measure. This FOM_max technique is particularly useful in characterizing complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technologies in the deep submicron regime. A knowledge of the exact value of gate length is not necessary to apply the FOM_max methodology. For a fixed supply voltage and gate oxide thickness, node capacitance and transistor drive, and off currents determine the value of FOM_max. The value of gate length at which FOM_max occurs decreases with decreasing supply voltage. FOM_max analysis is applied to the comparison of CMOS technologies using gate oxide thicknesses of 5.7 and 3.8 nm