Noise-Immune Dual-Rail Dynamic Circuit for Wide Fan-In Gates in Asynchronous Designs

Dual-rail dynamic logic circuits can provide inverting and noninverting outputs, especially for asynchronous designs, to implement complicated gates at the cost of approximately doubling the area and power consumption. In this paper, a new dual-rail dynamic circuit is proposed which has lower die area consumption and higher noise immunity without dramatic speed degradation for even wide fan-in gates for asynchronous circuits. The main idea in the proposed circuit is that voltage due to the current of the pulldown network (PDN) is compared with the reference voltage to provide two complementary outputs. The reference voltage almost corresponds to the leakage current of the PDN with all transistors being off. The proposed circuit is compared with conventional dual-rail circuits such as differential domino logic and differential cross-coupled domino logic. Simulation results for 32-bit-wide OR gates designed using high-performance 16-nm predictive technology model demonstrate significant performance advantages such as 66% power reduction and at least 2.86× noise-immunity improvement at the same delay compared to the differential domino circuits. © 2012 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.