ADVANCED LOW-POWER DIGITAL CIRCUIT TECHNIQUES
- Muhammad S. Elrabaa
- Issam S. Abu-Khater
- Mohamed I. Elmasry
Book reviewed by: Sai Siddharth Kumar Dantu
The book deals with the advances in the low-power methodologies. Several high performance digital circuit designs that emphasize low-power and low-voltage operation are presented. The book emphasizes on circuit robustness, efficiency and ease of design. Practical design issues such as circuit reliability, reproducibility and overall system cost are introduced. The circuits presented represent a wide range of circuits used in VLSI systems and serve as good examples for low-power design.
Chapter-2 presents a low-power VLSI Adder implementation. The selected architecture is explained and two circuit implementations are provided. A method for optimizing the architecture is demonstrated along with simulation and layout strategies. Experimental results from the fabricated circuits are also presented. The new implementation showed a power saving of 22% and a speed increase of 34% than the normal method used at 3.3V.
Chapter-3 presents the Parallel Multiplier. Different parallel multiplier architectures are reviewed with emphasis on their low-power capabilities. The selected architecture and simulation strategy are explained. A 6-bit multiplier design multiplier design with different logic styles is presented and the performances of the different implementations are compared.
Chapter-4 deals with the design of a modern low-voltage low-power register file. The architecture is explained and the design of the different sub-blocks targeting high-speed low-power performance is presented. A complete 32X32 register file design and simulation is demonstrated.
Chapter-5 introduces low-power BiCMOS SRAM techniques with applicability towards 16Mb SRAMs with targeted access times of less than 5ns. The speed and power optimization of a 16Mb SRAM front-end is presented. Novel front-end circuits, word-driver and decoder and a latched sense-amplifier are described and compared to conventional circuits with similar functionality. The estimated total power savings resulting from using the new circuit techniques presented are between 22% and 43%.
Chapter-6 presents a novel full-swing low-voltage low-power BiCMOS circuit technique for on-chip drivers. The concept of operation is explained and verified using transient device simulations. Different logic gates with various complexities that were used as digital building blocks were implemented using the new technique. Their performance, regarding speed, area and power was compared to that of CMOS for several different technologies and supply voltages.
Chapter-7 presents low-voltage-swing inter-chip transceivers. A new high-speed low-power universal transceiver that can operate with a large range of termination voltages without the need for an external reference voltage is also presented. The design and performance of each block in the transceiver is discussed in detail. This work demonstrated the capabilities of the BiCMOS technology to implement diversified, high performance, smart I/O’s and voltage referencing circuits.
This book covers many practical design examples and thus can be used as a reference for the low power design. I feel it doesn’t have enough theory in it and is more problem oriented. A person with sound knowledge in low power design will find the book very useful more than an amateur.