Small Fan-in Floating-Gate Circuits with Application to an Improved Adder Structure

  • Authors:
  • Jon Alfredsson;Snorre Aunet;Bengt Oelmann

  • Affiliations:
  • Mid Sweden University;University of Oslo;Mid Sweden University

  • Venue:
  • VLSID '07 Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on VLSI Design held jointly with 6th International Conference: Embedded Systems
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

For digital circuits with ultra-low power consumption, floating- gate circuits (FGMOS) have been considered to be a potentially better technique than standard static CMOS circuits. One reason for this is because FGMOS only requires a few transistors per gate while it still can have a large fan-in. When power supply is reduced to subthreshold region it will influence the maximum fan-in that is possible to use in designs. In this paper we have investigated how the performance of FGMOS circuits will change in subthreshold region. Simulation in a 120 nm process technology shows that FGMOS will not be working for circuits that have a large fan-in and might not be useable for many designs. At 250 mV power supply it can have a maximum fan-in of 5 and for 150 mV the maximum is 3. FGMOS simulations of an improved full-adder structure with fan-in of 3 is also proposed and compared to a conventional structure with fan-in of 5. It is shown that the improved full-adder with fan-in 3 will have more than 36 times better energy-delay product (EDP).