A pulsed low-voltage swing latch for reduced power dissipation in high-frequency microprocessors

  • Authors:
  • Pong-Fei Lu;Nianzheng Cao;Leon Sigal;Pieter Woltgens;R. Robertazzi;D. Heidel

  • Affiliations:
  • IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY;IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY;IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY;IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY;IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY;IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2006 international symposium on Low power electronics and design
  • Year:
  • 2006

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

We have reported previously [1] a low-swing latch (LSL) with superior performance-power tradeoff compared to the conventional pass-gate master-slave latch. In this paper, hardware results are presented for the proposed LSL with pulsed clock waveforms. The motivation is to combine low-voltage swing with pulsed signals to further reduce overall system power in high-frequency microprocessors. We have designed a 65-bit accumulator loop experiment to mimic a microprocessor pipeline stage. The local clock buffer design features a mode switch to toggle between two-phase (c1/c2) master-slave clocking and one-phase pulsed (c2 only) clocking. Our data show that 15-25% system power saving can be achieved in pulsed mode compared to non-pulsed mode. Power contribution from individual components is also presented.