A flash-based digital circuit design flow

Traditionally, floating gate (flash) transistors have been used exclusively to implement non-volatile memory in its various forms. Recently, we showed that flash transistors can be used to implement digital circuits as well. In this paper, we present the details on the realization and characteristics of the block-level flash-based digital design. The current work describes the synthesis flow to decompose a circuit block into a network of interconnected FCs. The resulting network is characterized with respect to timing, power and energy, and the results are compared with a standard-cell based realization of the same block (obtained using commercial tools). We obtain significantly improved delay (0.59×), power (0.35×) and cell area (0.60×) compared to a traditional CMOS standard-cell based approach, when averaged over 12 standard benchmarks. It is generally rare that a circuit methodology yields results that are better than existing commercial standard-cell based flows in terms of delay, area, power and energy, and in this sense, we submit that our results are significant. Additional benefits of a flash-based digital design is that it allows for precision speed binning in the factory, and also enables in-field re-programmability (we note that our flash-based design is not an FPGA, but rather an ASIC style design) to counteract the speed degradation of a design due to aging. These benefits arise from the fact that the threshold voltage of flash devices can be controlled with precision.