The twin-transistor noise-tolerant dynamic circuit technique

This paper describes a new circuit technique for designing noise-tolerant dynamic logic. It is shown that voltage scaling aggravates the crosstalk noise problem and reduces circuit noise immunity, motivating the need for noise-tolerant circuit design. In a 0.35-/spl mu/m CMOS technology and at a given supply voltage, the proposed technique provides an improvement in noise immunity of 1.8/spl times/(for an AND gate) and 2.5/spl times/(for an adder carry chain) over domino at the same speed. A multiply-accumulate circuit has been designed and fabricated using a 0.35-/spl mu/m process to verify this technique. Experimental results indicate that the proposed technique provides a significant improvement in the noise immunity of dynamic circuits (>2.4x) with only a modest increase in power dissipation (15%) and no loss in throughput.

[1]  Fumio Murabayashi,et al.  2.5 V CMOS circuit techniques for a 200 MHz superscalar RISC processor , 1996 .

[2]  Theodore I. Kamins,et al.  Device Electronics for Integrated Circuits , 1977 .

[3]  C. S. Murthy,et al.  Process variation effects on circuit performance: TCAD simulation of 256-Mbit technology [DRAMs] , 1997, IEEE Trans. Comput. Aided Des. Integr. Circuits Syst..

[4]  Naresh R. Shanbhag,et al.  Energy-efficient dynamic circuit design in the presence of crosstalk noise , 1999, Proceedings. 1999 International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design (Cat. No.99TH8477).

[5]  Kenneth L. Shepard Design methodologies for noise in digital integrated circuits , 1998, Proceedings 1998 Design and Automation Conference. 35th DAC. (Cat. No.98CH36175).

[6]  Trevor York,et al.  Book Review: Principles of CMOS VLSI Design: A Systems Perspective , 1986 .

[7]  Christer Svensson,et al.  Noise in digital dynamic CMOS circuits , 1994 .

[8]  Naresh R. Shanbhag,et al.  An energy-efficient noise-tolerant dynamic circuit technique , 2000 .

[9]  B. M. Gordon,et al.  Supply and threshold voltage scaling for low power CMOS , 1997, IEEE J. Solid State Circuits.

[10]  Naresh R. Shanbhag,et al.  A noise-tolerant dynamic circuit design technique , 2000, Proceedings of the IEEE 2000 Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (Cat. No.00CH37044).

[11]  A. R. Newton,et al.  Alpha-power law MOSFET model and its applications to CMOS inverter delay and other formulas , 1990 .

[12]  Kenneth L. Shepard,et al.  Noise in deep submicron digital design , 1996, Proceedings of International Conference on Computer Aided Design.

[13]  Tadahiro Kuroda,et al.  Variable supply-voltage scheme for low-power high-speed CMOS digital design , 1998, IEEE J. Solid State Circuits.

[14]  Christer Svensson,et al.  Trading speed for low power by choice of supply and threshold voltages , 1993 .

[15]  Anantha P. Chandrakasan,et al.  Low-Power CMOS Design , 1997 .