A low-power delay buffer using gated driver tree

  • Authors:

  • Po-Chun Hsieh;Jing-Siang Jhuang;Pei-Yun Tsai;Tzi-Dar Chiueh

  • Affiliations:

  • Graduate Institute of Electronics Engineering and the Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan;Graduate Institute of Electronics Engineering and the Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan;Department of Electrical Engineering, National Central University, Jhong-Li, Taiwan and Graduate Institute of Electronics Engineering and the Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan ...;Graduate Institute of Electronics Engineering and the Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

This paper presents circuit design of a low-power delay buffer. The proposed delay buffer uses several new techniques to reduce its power consumption. Since delay buffers are accessed sequentially, it adopts a ring-counter addressing scheme. In the ring counter, double-edge-triggered (DET) flip-flops are utilized to reduce the operating frequency by half and the C-element gated-clock strategy is proposed. A novel gated-clock-driver tree is then applied to further reduce the activity along the clock distribution network. Moreover, the gated-driver-tree idea is also employed in the input and output ports of the memory block to decrease their loading, thus saving even more power. Both simulation results and experimental results show great improvement in power consumption. A 256 × 8 delay buffer is fabricated and verified in 0.18 µm CMOS technology and it dissipates only 2.56 mW when operating at 135 MHz from 1.8-V supply voltage.