采用交流能源的低功耗CPL电路

从改变CM O S电路中能量转换模式的观点出发,研究CPL电路在采用交流能源后的低功耗特性。在此基础上提出了一种仅由nM O S构成的低功耗绝热电路——nM O S Com p lem en tary Pass-trans istor A d iabaticLog ic(nCPAL)。该电路利用nM O S管自举原理对负载进行全绝热驱动,从而减小了电路整体功耗和芯片面积。nCPAL能耗几乎与工作频率无关,对负载的敏感程度也较低。采用TSM C的0.25μm CM O S工艺,设计了一个8-b it超前进位加法器和功率时钟产生器。版图后仿真表明,在50~200 MH z频率范围内,nCPAL全加器的功耗仅为PAL-2N电路和2N-2N 2P电路的50%和35%。研究表明nCAPL适合于在VLS I设计中对功率要求较高的应用场合。     

Implementing Multiphase Resonant Clocking on a Finite-Impulse Response Filter

Rotary clock is a resonant clocking technique that delivers on-chip clock signal distribution with very low power dissipation. Since it can only generate clock signals with multiple phases that are spatially distributed, rotary clock is often considered not applicable to industrial very large scale integration (VLSI) designs. This paper presents the first rotary-clock-based nontrivial digital circuit. Our design, a low-power and high-speed finite-impulse response (FIR) filter, is fully digital and generated using CMOS standard cells in 0.18 mum technology. We have shown that the proposed FIR filter is seamlessly integrated with the rotary clock technique. It uses the spatially distributed multiple clock phases of rotary clock and achieves high power savings. Simulation results demonstrate that our rotary-clock-based FIR filter can operate successfully at 610 MHz, providing a throughput of 39 Gb/s. In comparison with the conventional clock-tree-based design, our design achieves a 34.6% clocking power saving and a 12.8% overall circuit power saving. In addition, the peak current consumed by the rotary-clock-based filter is substantially lower by 40% on the average. Our study makes the crucial step toward the application of rotary clock technique to a broad range of VLSI designs.     

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 of a 32 bit microprocessor, TX1

Implementation of the TX1 VLSI microprocessor is described. Particular emphasis is placed on the design method, which meets the requirements of short design time with reasonable chip size. A one-phase clock system, which is a better solution for high-speed operation but requires careful design for evading the skew problem, is discussed. Design for testability is embedded in the chip. The TX1 is fabricated with a 1.0 μm two-layer metal CMOS process. The chip contains 450 K transistors in a 10.89×10.27 mm² die     

A portable clock multiplier generator using digital CMOS standardcells

High frequency clock rate is a key issue in today's VLSI. To improve performance on-chip, clock multipliers are used. But it is a difficult task to design such circuits while maintaining low cost. This paper presents a circuit fabricated to test a new method of clock frequency multiplication. This new approach uses a digital CMOS process in order to implement a fully integrated digital delay locked loop. This multiplier does not require external components. Moreover, as it is primarily intended for ASIC design, it is generated by a parameterized generator written in C which relies on a portable digital standard cell library for automatic place and route. The design based on the delay locked loop allows the clock waveform to reach its operating point faster than conventional methods. Special techniques enable high multiplication factors (between 4 and 20) without compromising the timing accuracy. With a clock multiplier of 20, in 1 μm CMOS process and a 5 V supply voltage, a 170 MHz clock signal has been obtained from a 8.5 MHz external clock with a measured jitter lower than 300 ps     

Crosstalk noise reduction in synthesized digital logic circuits

As CMOS technology scales into the deep submicrometer regime, digital noise is becoming a metric of importance comparable to area, timing, and power, for analysis and design of CMOS VLSI systems. Noise has two detrimental effects in digital circuits: First, it can destroy logical information carried by a circuit net. Second, it causes delay uncertainty: Non critical paths might become critical because of noise. As a result, circuit speed becomes limited by noise, primarily because of capacitive coupling between wires. Most design approaches address the crosstalk noise problem at the layout generation stage, or via postlayout corrections. With continued scaling, too many circuit nets require corrections for noise, causing a design convergence problem. This work suggests to consider noise at the gate-level netlist generation stage. The paper presents a simplified analysis of on-chip crosstalk models, and demonstrates the significance of crosstalk between local wires within synthesized circuit blocks. A design flow is proposed for automatically synthesizing CMOS circuits that have improved robustness to noise effects, using standard tools, by limiting the range of gate strengths available in the cell library. The synthesized circuits incur a penalty in area/power, which can be partially recovered in a single postlayout corrective iteration. Results of design experiments indicate that delay uncertainty is the most important noise-related concern in synthesized static CMOS logic. Using a standard synthesis methodology, critical path delay differences up to 18% of the clock cycle time have been observed in functional blocks of microprocessor circuits. By using the proposed design flow, timing uncertainty was reduced to below 3%, with area and power penalties below 20%.     

A robust single phase clocking for low power, high-speed VLSIapplications

Power dissipation is becoming a prime design constraint in VLSI systems. The new key words for evaluating a design's performance are low power and high speed. This requires an overall system design review that considers suitable algorithms, architectures, circuits, and technology. In synchronous systems, the clocking network sets the frame that contains the whole design. It must be simple and robust. Power consumption in the clock distribution network has usually been a substantial part of the system total power consumption. New true single phase latches and flip flops are presented that are slope-insensitive, fast, and have data dependent power consumption. Flip flops are presented that work between DC and 1.7 GHz clock frequencies in a 1 μm CMOS technology. Methods are given that result in power saving in the clock system by reducing the clock rate by half for the same data throughput on the system level     

A 64-b quad-issue CMOS RISC microprocessor

The HP-PA8000 is a 180-MHz quad-issue custom VLSI implementation of the HP-PA 2.0 64-b architecture delivering 11.84 SPECint95 and 20.18 SPECfp95 with 3.8 million transistors integrated on a 17.68 mm×19.1 mm die in a 3.3-V, 0.5-μm CMOS process. Specialized clock circuits and extensive use of dynamic logic are key factors in this microprocessor's performance. Attention to clock analysis and distribution resulted in a 170 ps clock skew between any two clock nodes. This microprocessor utilizes a 56-entry instruction reorder buffer (IRE), register renaming, and dual functional units to fully exploit instruction level parallelism     

一种高效时钟树综合实现方法

针对ASIC芯片设计中时钟树综合效率和时序收敛的问题,提出了一种高效的时钟树综合方法,特别适用于现代先进深亚微米工艺中的高集成度、高复杂度的设计中。改进了传统时钟树综合方法,通过采用由下至上逐级分步综合的方法实现。该设计方法在SMIC 0.18μm eflash工艺下的一款电力线载波通信芯片中成功流片验证,结果表明分步综合能够在实现传统设计功能的前提下,在完成时序收敛时有效减少不必要的器件插入,从而减小芯片面积,降低整体功耗,有效改善绕线拥塞度。     

A low-power microprocessor based on resonant energy

We describe AC-1, a CMOS microprocessor that derives most of its operating power from the clock signals rather than from dc supplies. Clock-powered circuit elements are selectively used to drive high-fan-out nodes. An inductor-based, all-resonant clock-power generator allows us to recover 85% of the clock-drive energy. The measured top frequency for the microprocessor was 58.8 MHz at 26.2 mW. The resulting overall decrease in dissipation ranges from four to five times at clock frequencies from 35 to 54 MHz. We also compare the performance of the processor to a reimplementation in static logic     

A 433-MHz 64-b quad-issue RISC microprocessor

A quad-issue custom VLSI microprocessor is described. This microprocessor implements the Alpha architecture and achieves an estimated performance of 13.3 SPECint9S and 18.4 SPECfp95 at 433 MHz. The 9.6 million transistor die measures 14.4 mm×14.5 mm, and is fabricated in a 0.35-μm, four-metal layer CMOS process. This chip dissipates less than 25 W at 433 MHz using a 2.0 V internal power supply. The design was leveraged from a prior 300-MHz, 3.3-V, 0.50-μm CMOS design. It includes several significant architectural enhancements and required circuit solutions for operation at 2.0 V. The chip will operate at nominal internal power supply voltages up to 2.5 V allowing improved performance at the cost of increased power consumption. At 2.5 V, the chip operates at 500 MHz and delivers 15.4 SPECint95 (est) and 21.1 SPECfp95 (est). This paper describes the chip implementation details and the strategy for efficiently migrating the existing design to the 0.35-μm technology     

A 90-nm Power Optimization Methodology With Application to the ARM 1136JF-S Microprocessor

An electrical and physical design power optimization methodology and design techniques developed to create an IC with an ARM 1136JF-S microprocessor in 90-nm standard CMOS are presented. Design technology and methodology enhancements to enable multiple supply voltage operation, leakage current and clock rate optimization, single-pass RTL synthesis,$V_ DD$selection, power optimization and timing and electrical closure in a multi-$V_ DD$domain design are described. A 40% reduction in dynamic and a 46% reduction in leakage power dissipation has been achieved while maintaining a 355-MHz operating clock rate under typical conditions. Functional and electrical design requirements were achieved with the first silicon.     

A Low Power 16‐Bit RISC Microprocessor Using ECRL Circuits

This paper presents a low power 16‐bit adiabatic reduced instruction set computer (RISC) microprocessor with efficient charge recovery logic (ECRL) registers. The processor consists of registers, a control block, a register file, a program counter, and an arithmetic and logical unit (ALU). Adiabatic circuits based on ECRL are designed using a 0.35 µm CMOS technology. An adiabatic latch based on ECRL is proposed for signal interfaces for the first time, and an efficient four‐phase supply clock generator is designed to provide power for the adiabatic processor. A static CMOS processor with the same architecture is designed to compare the energy consumption of adiabatic and non‐adiabatic microprocessors. Simulation results show that the power consumption of the adiabatic microprocessor is about 1/3 compared to that of the static CMOS microprocessor.     

Simultaneous power supply, threshold voltage, and transistor sizeoptimization for low-power operation of CMOS circuits

This paper demonstrates a new approach for minimizing the total of the static and the dynamic power dissipation components in a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) logic network required to operate at a specified clock frequency. The algorithms presented can be used to design ultralow-power CMOS logic circuits by joint optimization of supply voltage, threshold voltage and device widths. The static, dynamic and short-circuit energy components are considered and an efficient heuristic is developed that delivers over an order of magnitude savings in power over conventional optimization methods     

Rotary traveling-wave oscillator arrays: a new clock technology

Rotary traveling-wave oscillators (RTWOs) represent a new transmission-line approach to gigahertz-rate clock generation. Using the inherently stable LC characteristics of on-chip VLSI interconnect, the clock distribution network becomes a low-impedance distributed oscillator. The RTWO operates by creating a rotating traveling wave within a closed-loop differential transmission line. Distributed CMOS inverters serve as both transmission-line amplifiers and latches to power the oscillation and ensure rotational lock. Load capacitance is absorbed into the transmission-line constants whereby energy is recirculated giving an adiabatic quality. Unusually for an LC oscillator, multiphase (360°) square waves are produced directly. RTWO structures are compact and can be wired together to form rotary oscillator arrays (ROAs) to distribute a phase-locked clock over a large chip. The principle is scalable to very high clock frequencies. Issues related to interconnect and field coupling dominate the design process for RTWOs. Taking precautions to avoid unwanted signal couplings, the rise and fall times of 20 ps, suggested by simulation, may be realized at low power consumption. Experimental results of the 0.25-μm CMOS test chip with 950-MHz and 3.4-GHz rings are presented, indicating 5,5-ps jitter and 34-dB power supply rejection ratio (PSRR). Design errors in the test chip precluded meaningful rise and fall time measurements     

Proposed low power, high speed adder-based 65-nm Square root circuit

This paper focuses on the design of a 1-bit full adder circuit using Shannon’s theorem and adder-based non-Restoring and Restoring Square Rooter circuits. The proposed adder and Square Rooter schematics were developed using DSCH2 CAD tool, and their layouts were generated with Microwind 3 VLSI CAD tool. The Square Rooter circuits were analysed using standard CMOS 65-nm features with a corresponding voltage of 0.7 V. BSIM 4 was used to analyse the parameters. The proposed adder-based Square Rooter simulated results of the proposed adder with those of CPL, Static Energy Recovery Full (SERF), and CMOS adder cell-based Square Rooter circuits; the proposed adder-based Square Rooter circuit gives better results than the other adder-based Square Rooter circuits. We then compared the results with published results and observed that the proposed adder cell-based Square Rooter circuit dissipates lower power, responds faster, and has a higher EPI and higher throughput.     

A 2-ns detecting time, 2-μm CMOS built-in current sensingcircuit

Built-in current testing is known to enhance the defect coverage in CMOS VLSI. An experimental CMOS chip containing a high-speed built-in current sensing (BICS) circuit design is described. This chip has been fabricated through MOSIS 2-μm p-well CMOS technology. The power bus current of an 8×8 parallel multiplier is monitored. This BICS detects all implanted short-circuit defects and some implanted open-circuit defects at a clock speed of 30 MHz (limited by the test setup). SPICE3 simulations indicate a defect detection time of about 2 ns     

Low-power logic styles: CMOS versus pass-transistor logic

Recently reported logic style comparisons based on full-adder circuits claimed complementary pass-transistor logic (CPL) to be much more power-efficient than complementary CMOS. However, new comparisons performed on more efficient CMOS circuit realizations and a wider range of different logic cells, as well as the use of realistic circuit arrangements demonstrate CMOS to be superior to CPL in most cases with respect to speed, area, power dissipation, and power-delay products. An implemented 32-b adder using complementary CMOS has a power-delay product of less than half that of the CPL version. Robustness with respect to voltage scaling and transistor sizing, as well as generality and ease-of-use, are additional advantages of CMOS logic gates, especially when cell-based design and logic synthesis are targeted. This paper shows that complementary CMOS is the logic style of choice for the implementation of arbitrary combinational circuits if low voltage, low power, and small power-delay products are of concern     

Analysis and design of high-speed and low-power CMOS PLAs

The programmable logic array (PLA) is a basic and important building circuit for VLSI chips. Operating behaviors of several conventional PLAs are analyzed first to find out their speed and power bottlenecks. Then, new circuit design techniques for the CMOS PLA are proposed in the hopes of fulfilling the requirements of high speed and low power at the same time. Finally, high speed is achieved through the combined effect of utilization of a fast pseudofootless dynamic circuit and a reduced interplane clock delay. On the other hand, low power is achieved because the power consumption from the three main sources, i.e., the AND-plane circuits, the interplane buffers, and the OR-plane circuits, can be reduced significantly and simultaneously. The delay time and the power consumption of the critical path of a PLA are taken as the performance evaluation parameters. When the 50×50×64 PLAs are designed in a 0.35-μm 1P4M CMOS technology, the maximum operating frequency of the proposed PLA is 1.61 times higher than that of the fastest conventional PLA. Furthermore, power reduction can be as high as 18% and 43% when the operating frequencies are set to be 100 MHz and 50 MHz, respectively, as compared to the most power-efficient conventional PLA     

A 300-MHz 115-W 32-b bipolar ECL microprocessor

A full-custom single-chip bipolar ECL RISC microprocessor was implemented in a 1.0-μm single-poly bipolar technology. This research prototype contains a CPU and on-chip 2-KB instruction and 2-KB data caches. Worst-case power dissipation with a nominal -5.2 V supply is 115 W. The chip has been designed for a worst-case clock frequency of 275 MHz at a nominal supply. The chip verifies a new style of CAD tools developed during the design process, advanced packaging techniques for high-power microprocessors, and VLSI ECL circuit techniques