Book Description

Designing CMOS Circuits for Low Power provides the fundamentals of low power design for logic, circuit, and physical design level as well as the "design story" of two innovative low power systems developed in the context of European Low Power Initiative for Electronic System Design. The main objective is to present in-depth analytical and design capabilities for low power design CMOS circuits. Determining the sources of power dissipation, in-depth description of the main existing low power optimization and estimation techniques, and, their corresponding advantages, drawbacks and comparisons are discussed. Part I starts with the description of the main principles of dynamic, short-circuit, static, and leakage power dissipation together with the low power strategies for reducing each power component. A typical low power design flow consists of power optimization and estimation techniques, which should be applied in each design level. Starting with the formulation of logic optimization problem, technology independent and technology-dependent power optimization steps for combinational and sequential logic circuits are presented. The power characteristics of different logic styles such as dynamic logic and pass transistor logic and alternative implementations of basic digital circuits are studied and compared in terms of performance, area and power dissipation. Efficient implementations and comparisons of adder and multiplier circuits for various topologies are addressed. Furthermore, novel techniques that reduce the power based on alternative arithmetic schemes are investigated. Then, we tackle with the power reduction techniques for SRAM and DRAM memories. In the physical design level, the power optimization issues of clock distribution, interconnect, and layout design are described. The first part ends up with the advantages and drawbacks of the simulation-based and probabilistic power estimation methods of a logic circuit. The second part gives the architecture and the design techniques used for the low power implementation of a Safety-Critical Application Specific Instruction Processor and ultrasound beamformer application specific integrated circuit. Designing CMOS Circuits for Low Power can be used as a textbook for undergraduate and graduate students, and, VLSI design engineers and professionals from academia and industry, who have had a basic knowledge of Microelectronics and CMOS digital design.