Adiabatic Flip-Flops and Sequential Circuit Design using Novel Resettable Adiabatic Buffers

We propose novel resettable adiabatic buffers for five adiabatic logic families namely; Efficient Adiabatic Charge Recovery Logic (EACRL), Improved Efficient Charge Recovery Logic (IECRL), Positive Feedback Adiabatic Logic (PFAL), Complementary Pass-transistor Adiabatic Logic (CPAL) and Clocked Adiabatic Logic (CAL). We present the design of resettable flip-flops using the proposed buffers. The proposed flip-flops alleviate the problem of increased energy and area consumption incurred by the existing mux-based resettable flip-flops. We then design the 3-bit up-down counters and extended our comparison beyond energy dissipation using the above five adiabatic logic families. PFAL based sequential circuit designs gives the best performance trade-offs in terms of complexity, energy, speed and area compared to the other adiabatic designs

Digital logic circuit design using adiabatic approach

A major challenge for the circuit designers nowadays is to meet the demand for low power, especially those used in portable and wearable devices which have limited energy power supply. The reasons of designing low power consumption circuit are to reduce energy usage and minimize dissipation of heat. Adiabatic technique is an attractive approach to obtain power optimization where some of the charge in capacitance can be recycled instead of being dissipated as heat. In this thesis, a methodology for designing sequential adiabatic circuits employing a single-phase power clock was investigated. Initially, methods to simulate dynamic power were analysed by identifying a better and reliable method to simulate adiabatic dynamic power. In addition, a method to validate the output voltage swing was presented. The relationship between voltage swing and power dissipation was analysed. Then, several adiabatic sequential D flip flops (DFF) designs which make use of combinational adiabatic circuit design based on quasi-adiabatic were proposed and suitable types of alternating current power supply which influence dynamic power were analysed and selected. The functionality and performance of the proposed circuits were compared against other adiabatic and traditional Complimentary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) circuits and verified to function up to 1 GHz operating region. Besides the circuits, the layout of the proposed sequential adiabatic design was also produced. All simulations were carried out using 0.25 ^m CMOS technology parameters using Tanner Electronic Design Aided and HSPICE tools. The findings showed that the proposed combinational circuit had less transistor count, lower power dissipation with lower voltage swing as compared to reference adiabatic circuits. Furthermore, the proposed sequential DFF circuit showed 25% less power dissipation compared to traditional CMOS

Adiabatic Circuits for Power-Constrained Cryptographic Computations

This thesis tackles the need for ultra-low power operation in power-constrained cryptographic computations. An example of such an application could be smartcards. One of the techniques which has proven to have the potential of rendering ultra-low power operation is ‘Adiabatic Logic Technique’. However, the adiabatic circuits has associated challenges due to high energy dissipation of the Power-Clock Generator (PCG) and complexity of the multi-phase power-clocking scheme. Energy efficiency of the adiabatic system is often degraded due to the high energy dissipation of the PCG. In this thesis, nstep charging strategy using tank capacitors is considered for the power-clock generation and several design rules and trade-offs between the circuit complexity and energy efficiency of the PCG using n-step charging circuits have been proposed. Since pipelining is inherent in adiabatic logic design, careful selection of architecture is essential, as otherwise overhead in terms of area and energy due to synchronization buffers is induced specifically, in the case of adiabatic designs using 4-phase power-clocking scheme. Several architectures for the Montgomery multiplier using adiabatic logic technique are implemented and compared. An architecture which constitutes an appropriate trade-off between energy efficiency and throughput is proposed along with its methodology. Also, a strategy to reduce the overhead due to synchronization buffers is proposed. A modification in the Montgomery multiplication algorithm is proposed. Furthermore, a problem due to the application of power-clock gating in cascade stages of adiabatic logic is identified. The problem degrades the energy savings that would otherwise be obtained by the application of power-clock gating. A solution to this problem is proposed. Cryptographic implementations also present an obvious target for Power Analysis Attacks (PAA). There are several existing secure adiabatic logic designs which are proposed as a countermeasure against PAA. Shortcomings of the existing logic designs are identified, and two novel secure adiabatic logic designs are proposed as the countermeasures against PAA and improvement over the existing logic designs

Techniques of Energy-Efficient VLSI Chip Design for High-Performance Computing

How to implement quality computing with the limited power budget is the key factor to move very large scale integration (VLSI) chip design forward. This work introduces various techniques of low power VLSI design used for state of art computing. From the viewpoint of power supply, conventional in-chip voltage regulators based on analog blocks bring the large overhead of both power and area to computational chips. Motivated by this, a digital based switchable pin method to dynamically regulate power at low circuit cost has been proposed to make computing to be executed with a stable voltage supply. For one of the widely used and time consuming arithmetic units, multiplier, its operation in logarithmic domain shows an advantageous performance compared to that in binary domain considering computation latency, power and area. However, the introduced conversion error reduces the reliability of the following computation (e.g. multiplication and division.). In this work, a fast calibration method suppressing the conversion error and its VLSI implementation are proposed. The proposed logarithmic converter can be supplied by dc power to achieve fast conversion and clocked power to reduce the power dissipated during conversion. Going out of traditional computation methods and widely used static logic, neuron-like cell is also studied in this work. Using multiple input floating gate (MIFG) metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) based logic, a 32-bit, 16-operation arithmetic logic unit (ALU) with zipped decoding and a feedback loop is designed. The proposed ALU can reduce the switching power and has a strong driven-in capability due to coupling capacitors compared to static logic based ALU. Besides, recent neural computations bring serious challenges to digital VLSI implementation due to overload matrix multiplications and non-linear functions. An analog VLSI design which is compatible to external digital environment is proposed for the network of long short-term memory (LSTM). The entire analog based network computes much faster and has higher energy efficiency than the digital one

Low power predictable memory and processing architectures

Great demand in power optimized devices shows promising economic potential and draws lots of attention in industry and research area. Due to the continuously shrinking CMOS process, not only dynamic power but also static power has emerged as a big concern in power reduction. Other than power optimization, average-case power estimation is quite significant for power budget allocation but also challenging in terms of time and effort. In this thesis, we will introduce a methodology to support modular quantitative analysis in order to estimate average power of circuits, on the basis of two concepts named Random Bag Preserving and Linear Compositionality. It can shorten simulation time and sustain high accuracy, resulting in increasing the feasibility of power estimation of big systems. For power saving, firstly, we take advantages of the low power characteristic of adiabatic logic and asynchronous logic to achieve ultra-low dynamic and static power. We will propose two memory cells, which could run in adiabatic and non-adiabatic mode. About 90% dynamic power can be saved in adiabatic mode when compared to other up-to-date designs. About 90% leakage power is saved. Secondly, a novel logic, named Asynchronous Charge Sharing Logic (ACSL), will be introduced. The realization of completion detection is simplified considerably. Not just the power reduction improvement, ACSL brings another promising feature in average power estimation called data-independency where this characteristic would make power estimation effortless and be meaningful for modular quantitative average case analysis. Finally, a new asynchronous Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU) with a ripple carry adder implemented using the logically reversible/bidirectional characteristic exhibiting ultra-low power dissipation with sub-threshold region operating point will be presented. The proposed adder is able to operate multi-functionally

Asynchrobatic logic for low-power VLSI design

In this work, Asynchrobatic Logic is presented. It is a novel low-power design style that combines the energy saving benefits of asynchronous logic and adiabatic logic to produce systems whose power dissipation is reduced in several different ways. The term “Asynchrobatic” is a new word that can be used to describe these types of systems, and is derived from the concatenation and shortening of Asynchronous, Adiabatic Logic. This thesis introduces the concept and theory behind Asynchrobatic Logic. It first provides an introductory background to both underlying parent technologies (asynchronous logic and adiabatic logic). The background material continues with an explanation of a number of possible methods for designing complex data-path cells used in the adiabatic data-path. Asynchrobatic Logic is then introduced as a comparison between asynchronous and Asynchrobatic buffer chains, showing that for wide systems, it operates more efficiently. Two more-complex sub-systems are presented, firstly a layout implementation of the substitution boxes from the Twofish encryption algorithm, and secondly a front-end only (without parasitic capacitances, resistances) simulation that demonstrates a functional system capable of calculating the Greatest Common Denominator (GCD) of a pair of 16-bit unsigned integers, which under typical conditions on a 0.35μm process, executed a test vector requiring twenty-four iterations in 2.067μs with a power consumption of 3.257nW. These examples show that the concept of Asynchrobatic Logic has the potential to be used in real-world applications, and is not just theory without application. At the time of its first publication in 2004, Asynchrobatic Logic was both unique and ground-breaking, as this was the first time that consideration had been given to operating large-scale adiabatic logic in an asynchronous fashion, and the first time that Asynchronous Stepwise Charging (ASWC) had been used to drive an adiabatic data-path

Adiabatic Approach for Low-Power Passive Near Field Communication Systems

This thesis tackles the need of ultra-low power electronics in the power limited passive Near Field Communication (NFC) systems. One of the techniques that has proven the potential of delivering low power operation is the Adiabatic Logic Technique. However, the low power benefits of the adiabatic circuits come with the challenges due to the absence of single opinion on the most energy efficient adiabatic logic family which constitute appropriate trade-offs between computation time, area and complexity based on the circuit and the power-clocking schemes. Therefore, five energy efficient adiabatic logic families working in single-phase, 2-phase and 4-phase power-clocking schemes were chosen. Since flip-flops are the basic building blocks of any sequential circuit and the existing flip-flops are MUX-based (having more transistors) design, therefore a novel single-phase, 2-phase and 4-phase reset based flip-flops were proposed. The performance of the multi-phase adiabatic families was evaluated and compared based on the design examples such as 2-bit ring counter, 3-bit Up-Down counter and 16-bit Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) circuit (benchmark circuit) based on ISO 14443-3A standard. Several trade-offs, design rules, and an appropriate range for the supply voltage scaling for multi-phase adiabatic logic are proposed. Furthermore, based on the NFC standard (ISO 14443-3A), data is frequently encoded using Manchester coding technique before transmitting it to the reader. Therefore, if Manchester encoding can be implemented using adiabatic logic technique, energy benefits are expected. However, adiabatic implementation of Manchester encoding presents a challenge. Therefore, a novel method for implementing Manchester encoding using adiabatic logic is proposed overcoming the challenges arising due to the AC power-clock. Other challenges that come with the dynamic nature of the adiabatic gates and the complexity of the 4-phase power-clocking scheme is in synchronizing the power-clock v phases and the time spent in designing, validation and debugging of errors. This requires a specific modelling approach to describe the adiabatic logic behaviour at the higher level of abstraction. However, describing adiabatic logic behaviour using Hardware Description Languages (HDLs) is a challenging problem due to the requirement of modelling the AC power-clock and the dual-rail inputs and outputs. Therefore, a VHDL-based modelling approach for the 4-phase adiabatic logic technique is developed for functional simulation, precise timing analysis and as an improvement over the previously described approaches

Aeronomy report no. 74: The Urbana meteor-radar system; design, development, and first observations

The design, development, and first observations of a high power meteor-radar system located near Urbana, Illinois are described. The roughly five-fold increase in usable echo rate compared to other facilities, along with automated digital data processing and interferometry measurement of echo arrival angles, permits unsurpassed observations of tidal structure and shorter period waves. Such observations are discussed. The technique of using echo decay rates to infer density and scale height and the method of inferring wind shear from radial acceleration are examined. An original experiment to test a theory of the Delta-region winter anomaly is presented