Modular Design of testable reversible ALU by QCA multiplexer with increase in programmability

The quantum-dot cellular automata have emerged as one of the potential computational fabrics for the emerging nanocomputing systems due to their ultra-high speed and integration density. On the other hand, reversible computing promises low power consuming circuits by nullifying the energy dissipation during the computation. This work targets the design of a reversible arithmetic logic unit (RALU) in the quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA) framework. The design is based on the reversible multiplexer (RM) synthesized by compact 2:1 QCA multiplexers introduced in this paper. The proposed reversible multiplexer is able to achieve 100% fault tolerance in the presence of single missing or additional cell defects in QCA layout. Furthermore, the advantage of modular design of reversible multiplexer is shown by its application in synthesizing the RALU with separate reversible arithmetic unit (RAU) and reversible logic unit (RLU). The RALU circuit can be tested for classical unidirectional stuck-at faults using the constant variable used in this design. The experimentation establishes that the proposed RALU outperforms the conventional reversible ALU in terms of programming flexibility and testability.     

Low-power multi-threshold MCML: Analysis, design, and variability

The increasing demand on low-power applications is adding pressure on circuit designers to come out with new circuit styles that can decrease power dissipation while making use of the performance improvement of the new CMOS technologies. Multi-threshold MOS current mode logic (MTMCML) appears to be a solution to this problem by making use of the high-performance of MOS current mode circuits while minimizing power dissipation with the help of multi-threshold CMOS technologies. In this work, analytical formulations, based on the BSIM3v3 model, are proposed for MTMCML performance measures with an error within 10% compared to HSPICE. The formulation helps designers to efficiently design MTMCML circuits without undergoing the time-consuming HSPICE simulations. Furthermore, it provides design guidelines and aids for designers to fully understand the different tradeoffs in MTMCML design. In addition, the analysis is extended to study the impact of technology scaling and parameter variations on MTMCML. It is shown that the worst case variation in the minimum supply voltage of MTMCML is 1.16%, thus suggesting maximal power saving.     

基于门控时钟技术的低功耗三值D型触发器设计

本文在三值D型触发器的基础上提出了一种低功耗三值门控时钟D型触发器的设计.该设计通过抑制触发器的冗余触发来降低功耗,PSPICE模拟验证了该触发器具有正确的逻辑功能.与三值D触发器相比,该触发器在输入信号开关活动性较低的情况下具有更低的功耗.同时该电路结构可以推广到基值更高的低功耗多值触发器的设计中.     

Low-Power Adaptive Biased Integrated Amplifiers

In this paper the author will present the working principle and the applications of a novel adaptive biasing topology, designed to decrease the stand-by power dissipation without affecting the transient performance of low-power amplifiers. The proposed circuit, whose principle and circuit topology can be implemented both in CMOS and in bipolar standard technologies, gives a biasing current whose value depends on the applied input differential voltage and can be set according to the requested transient performance constraints. The adaptive architecture can be utilized in the design of high-efficient low-power operational amplifiers, for the biasing of both the input stage (where the input source current is dynamically increased) and the output stage (where the output current can be controlled and limited). These amplifiers show a very good behaviour, evaluated in terms of two efficiency factors, if compared with those of other adaptive solutions and class-AB topologies, proposed in the literature. Simulation results and also measurements on a chip prototype, fabricated in a standard CMOS technology, are finally presented.     

Design of testable reversible latches by using a novel efficient implementation of Fredkin gate

ABSTRACT

Energy dissipation caused by information loss in irreversible computations will be an important limitation for the development of nano-scale circuits in the near future. Reductions in energy dissipation comprise one of the important goals of nanotechnology-based methods, including Quantum dot Cellular Automata (QCA), and so it is desirable to consider reversibility in the design of QCA circuits. In this research, a novel reversible Fredkin gate based on QCA is proposed, which is more efficient and less complex than the conventional Fredkin gate. Conservative reversible logic is parity preserving; hence, any permanent or transient fault can be caused a mismatch between the inputs and the outputs and can be concurrently detected if a reversible circuit is implemented with the conservative Fredkin gate. A single missing/additional cell defect is investigated in the proposed Fredkin gate and fault patterns are presented. To demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed design, some testable reversible sequential elements, such as D-latch, JK-latch, T-latch and SR-latch, are designed by using it. Our proposed concurrent testable designs greatly reduce the occupied area and maximise the circuit density in comparison with previously reported designs. The proposed designs are simulated and verified using QCA Designer ver.2.0.3 and HDLQ.     

A Low-Power Digital IC Design Inside the Wireless Endoscopic Capsule

This paper proposes an architecture of the wireless endoscopy system for the diagnoses of whole human digestive tract and real-time endoscopic image monitoring. The low-power digital IC design inside the wireless endoscopic capsule is discussed in detail. A very large scale integration (VLSI) architecture of three-stage clock management is applied, which can save 46% power inside the capsule compared with the design without such a low-power design. A stoppable ring crystal oscillator with minimal overhead is used in the sleep mode, which results in about 60-muW system power dissipation in sleep mode. A new image compression algorithm based on Bayer image format and its corresponding VLSI architecture are both proposed for low-power, high-data volume. Thus, 8 frames per second with 320*288 pixels can be transmitted with 2 Mb/s. The digital IC design also assures that the capsule has many flexible and useful functions for clinical application. The digital circuits were verified on field-programmable gate arrays and have been implemented in 0.18-mum CMOS process with 6.2 mW     

低功耗非全摆幅互补传输管加法器

文章提出了一种新型传输管全加器,该全加器采用互补传输管逻辑（Complementary Pass-Transistor Logic）实现.与现有的CPL全加器相比：该全加器具有面积、进位速度和功耗上的优势：并且提供了进位传播信号的输出,可以更简单的构成旁路进位加法器（Carry SkipAdder）.在此全加器基础上可以实现一种新型行波进位加法器（Ripple Carry Adder）,其内部进位信号处于非全摆幅状态,具有高速低功耗的特点.HSPICE模拟表明：对4位加法器而言,其速度接近CMOS提前进位加法器（Carry Look ahead Adder）,而功耗减小了61%.适用于高性能、低功耗的VLSI电路设计.     

Design and implementation of Multistage Interconnection Networks using Quantum-dot Cellular Automata

Quantum-dot Cellular Automata (QCA) is a promising nanotechnology with ultra-small feature size and ultra-low power consumption compared with transistor-based technologies. During the past decade the QCA has been carefully studied, and it has demonstrated the ability of using quantum phenomena for implementing logical devices. Multistage Interconnection Networks (MINs) have been frequently suggested as the connection means in parallel systems. This architecture provides the maximum bandwidth to the components, and the minimum latency access to memory modules. They are generally accepted concepts in the semiconductor industry for solving problems related to on-chip communications. Although there have been a large amount of researches on MINs for parallel processing, there seems to be surprising attempts to utilize the unique characteristics of QCA for designing and implementing of MINs. In an effort to fill this gap, this paper presents the first design methodology of MINs using QCA. To demonstrate the functionality and validity of the proposed methodology, performance evaluations of MINs using QCADesigner simulator are given and analyzed.     

Designing efficient QCA logical circuits with power dissipation analysis

Recently reported QCA logical and arithmetic designs have completely disregarded the power consumption issue of the circuits. In this paper, a comprehensive power dissipation analysis as well as a structural analysis over the previously published five-input majority gates is performed. During our experimentations, we found that these designs suffer from high power consumption and also structural weaknesses. Therefore, a new ultra-low power and low-complexity five-input majority gate is proposed. For examining our presented design in large array of QCA structures even parity generators, as instances of logical circuits with different lengths up to 32 bits are presented. The simulation results reveal that our proposed designs have significant improvements in contrast to counterparts from implementation requirements and power consumption aspects. QCADesigner tool is used to evaluate functional correctness of the proposed circuits and power dissipation is evaluated using QCAPro simulator as an accurate power estimator tool.     

Trading off transient fault tolerance and power consumption in deep submicron (DSM) VLSI circuits

High fault tolerance for transient faults and low-power consumption are key objectives in the design of critical embedded systems. Systems like smart cards, PDAs, wearable computers, pacemakers, defibrillators, and other electronic gadgets must not only be designed for fault tolerance but also for ultra-low-power consumption due to limited battery life. In this paper, a highly accurate method of estimating fault tolerance in terms of mean time to failure (MTTF) is presented. The estimation is based on circuit-level simulations (HSPICE) and uses a double exponential current-source fault model. Using counters, it is shown that the transient fault tolerance and power dissipation of low-power circuits are at odds and allow for a power fault-tolerance tradeoff. Architecture and circuit level fault tolerance and low-power techniques are used to demonstrate and quantify this tradeoff. Estimates show that incorporation of these techniques results either in a design with an MTTF of 36 years and power consumption of 102 /spl mu/W or a design with an MTTF of 12 years and power consumption of 20 /spl mu/W. Depending on the criticality of the system and the power budget, certain techniques might be preferred over others, resulting in either a more fault tolerant or a lower power design, at the sacrifice of the alternative objective.     

多通道数字助听器算法及低功耗VLSI设计

改进了多通道数字助听器中的听力补偿和噪声消除算法,并进行了低功耗VLSI设计.听力补偿方面,提出一种改进的多通道宽动态范围压缩(WDRC)算法;该方法降低了存储和计算开销,并抑制了对残余背景噪音的过度放大.噪声消除方面,利用语音谱和噪声谱的帧间相关性,改进了传统的多子带谱相减算法,使之在硬件实现时便于并行运算,同时不影响消噪性能.最后,综合采用多种低功耗设计方法,在SMIC的130nm工艺条件下,完成了基于上述算法的多通道数字助听器VLSI设计.后仿结果表明,该设计总功耗仅为228μW.     

Efficient algorithms for multilevel power estimation of VLSI circuits

This paper presents a methodology for calculating highly accurate mean power estimates for integrated digital CMOS circuits. A complementary calibration scheme for ASIC library cells to extract the power relevant parameters is proposed. The circuit models presented allows the prediction of mean power dissipation of gate-level designs in CMOS technologies with an accuracy that is comparable to a SPICE simulation but up to 10 000 times faster. The outlined approach is capable of handling complex circuits consisting of more than 20 000 cells and thousands of memory elements. Very large sets of input data with several millions of patterns can, thus, be simulated in an efficient way. This allows the prediction of mean power dissipation of VLSI circuits in a realistic functional context which provides new assessment possibilities for digital CMOS low-power design methods. Experimental results for some benchmark circuits are detailed in order to demonstrate the significant improvements in terms of performance, accuracy, and flexibility of this approach compared to state-of-the-art power estimation methods     

Single-bit digital comparator circuit design using quantum-dot cellular automata nanotechnology

The large amount of secondary effects in complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor technology limits its application in the ultra-nanoscale region. Circuit designers explore a new technology for the ultra-nanoscale region, which is the quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA). Low-energy dissipation, high speed, and area efficiency are the key features of the QCA technology. This research proposes a novel, low-complexity, QCA-based one-bit digital comparator circuit for the ultra-nanoscale region. The performance of the proposed comparator circuit is presented in detail in this paper and compared with that of existing designs. The proposed QCA structure for the comparator circuit only consists of 19 QCA cells with two clock phases. QCA Designer-E and QCA Pro tools are applied to estimate the total energy dissipation. The proposed comparator saves 24.00% QCA cells, 25.00% cell area, 37.50% layout cost, and 78.11% energy dissipation compared with the best reported similar design.     

Universal cellular automaton cell using quantum cellular automata

In recent years cellular automata (CAs) have been used widely to model and simulate physical systems and also to solve scientific problems. CAs have also been successfully used as a VLSI architecture and have proved to be very efficient at least in terms of silicon-area utilisation and clock-speed maximisation. Quantum cellular automata (QCA) is one of the promising emerging technologies for nanoscale circuit implementation. QCA technology provides very high scale integration, very high switching frequency and very low power circuit characteristics. In the work reported here, a universal cellular automaton cell has been designed using QCA circuitry. The implementation of CAs using QCA nanoelectronic circuits not only drives the already developed systems based on CAs to the nanoelectronics era but improves their performance significantly.     

Characterization of Single-Electron Tunneling Transistors for Designing Low-Power Embedded Systems

Minimizing power consumption is vitally important in embedded system design; power consumption determines battery lifespan. Ultra-low-power designs may even permit embedded systems to operate without batteries by scavenging energy from the environment. Moreover, managing power dissipation is now a key factor in integrated circuit packaging and cooling. As a result, embedded system price, size, weight, and reliability are all strongly dependent on power dissipation. Recent developments in nanoscale devices open new alternatives for low-power embedded system design. Among these, single-electron tunneling transistors (SETs) hold the promise of achieving the lowest power consumption. Unfortunately, most analysis of SETs has focused on single devices instead of architectures, making it difficult to determine whether they are appropriate for low-power embedded systems. Evaluating the use of SETs in large-scale digital systems requires novel architectural and circuit design. SET-based design imposes numerous challenges resulting from low driving strength, relatively large static power consumption, and the presence of reliability problems resulting from random background charge effects. We propose a fault-tolerant, hybrid SET/CMOS, reconfigurable architecture, named IceFlex, that can be tailored to specific requirements and allows tradeoffs among power consumption, performance requirements, operation temperature, fabrication cost, and reliability. Using IceFlex as a testbed, we characterize the benefits and limitations of SETs in embedded system designs. In particular, we focus on the use of SETs in room-temperature ultra-low-power embedded systems such as wireless sensor network nodes. We also consider high-performance applications such as multimedia consumer electronics. We see this work as a first step in determining the potential of ultra-low-power embedded system design using SETs.     

Widely tunable low-power high-linearity current-mode integrator built using DG-MOSFETs

A novel tunable current-mode integrator for low-voltage low-power applications is presented using mixed-mode TCAD simulations. The design is based on independently driven double-gate (IDDG) MOSFETs, a nano-scale four-terminal device, where one gate can be used to change the characteristics of the other. Using current-mirrors built with IDDG-MOSFETs, we show that the number of active devices in the tunable current-mode integrator, 16 in bulk CMOS design, may be halved, i.e. considerable savings in both total area and power dissipation. The integrator operates with single supply voltage of 1 V and a wide range of tunable bandwidth (~2 decades) and gain (~30 dB). This linear circuit has third-order harmonic distortion as low as ?70 dB in appropriate bias conditions, which can be set via the back-gates. The impact of tuning on the IDDG integrator and conventional design using symmetrically driven (SDDG) MOSFETs is comparatively studied. The proposed design is a good example for performance leverage through IDDG MOSFET architectures in analog circuits integral to future mixed-signal systems.     

Scalability of Globally Asynchronous QCA (Quantum-Dot Cellular Automata) Adder Design

The concept of clocking for QCA, referred to as the four-phase clocking, is widely used. However, inherited characteristics of QCA, such as the way to hold state, the way to synchronize data flows, and the way to power QCA cells, make the design of QCA circuits quite different from VLSI and introduce a variety of new design challenges. The most severe challenges are due to the fact that the overall timing of a QCA circuit is mainly dependent upon its layout. This issue is commonly referred to as the “layout = timing” problem. To circumvent the problem, a novel self-timed circuit design technique referred to as the Locally Synchronous, globally asynchronous design for QCA has been recently proposed. The proposed technique can significantly reduce the layout–timing dependency from the global network of QCA devices in a circuit; therefore, considerably flexible QCA circuit design is be possible. Also, the proposed technique is more scalable in designing large-scale systems. Since a less number of cells is used, the overall area is smaller and the manufacturability is better. In this paper, numerous multi-bit adder designs are considered to demonstrate the layout efficiency and robustness of the proposed globally asynchronous QCA design technique.     

A Modified CORDIC FPGA Implementation for Wave Generation

This paper presents a modified coordinate rotation digital computer (CORDIC) algorithm implemented in parallel architecture to generate sine and cosine waveform. Since CORDIC is a combination of only additions and shifts, it can be efficiently implemented in hardware. The proposed algorithm further approximates the way of computing rotation angle based on Taylor series in order to reduce the usage of Read-Only-Memory (ROM) table. Thus area and power is reduced due to partial usage of ROM storage. The precision remains the same as the original algorithm. The modified 32-bits pipeline CORDIC are implemented in Spartan XC3S500E device using Xilinx ISE 12.3 design suite. The result is compared with original CORDIC and Xilinx coregen in device utilization. It is shown that the logic usage is 31 FFs and 285 FFs less than the original design and Xilinx core, respectively. When compared with the original design, the signal power and total power reduction at 40 MHz clocks are 7.69 % and 1.35 %, respectively. The bit error remains at 10^?8 dB level. The SNR of modified CORDIC is about 2 dB lower, which is acceptable in wave generation.     

车载小功率双机组电站风道设计

电站是车载系统的重要组成部分,由于系统的可靠性、机动性的要求越来越高,车载小功率电站的需求也越来越多,常常需要电站与系统共用同一承载平台,介绍一种车载双机组小功率风冷型电站的通风散热设计,通过进排风道的结构设计、电站内部散热量计算及轴流风机的选择思路,为今后小功率风冷电站在车载系统上的应用提供技术依据。     

Hearing with bionic ears [cochlear implant devices]

According to speech perception-rate data continuous interleaved sampling (CIS) and spectral maxima sound processor (SMSP) techniques are, and probably will be, the best speech processing strategies for multichannel electrode cochlear implant devices. From packaging and power-consumption viewpoints, today's speech processing systems are very big and are, therefore, worn on the body and consume large electric power. Next-generation cochlear implant devices would be more compact, low-power products that would be worn behind or in the ear. It is clear that mixed-signal, high-density, and low-power design techniques are required to satisfy compactness, as well as low-power consumption features to realize intelligent speech sensation for the implantees. The especially critical design consideration of power supply lifetime and efficiency might be increased by using new promising technologies like microelectromechanical systems (MEMS)