Charge-sharing alleviation and detection for CMOS domino circuits

Abstract

Charge sharing, which occurs in any complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) domino gate, may degrade the output voltage level or may even cause an erroneous output value. In this paper, this problem is thoroughly investigated by considering circuit topology and circuit function. We describe a method to measure the sensitivity [called charge-sharing (CS) vulnerability] of the CS problem for each domino gate. A method to derive the CS vulnerability and the test vector for each domino gate is suggested. We also propose a transistor reordering method to dramatically reduce the CS vulnerabilities for all domino gates so that the CS problem can be alleviated. We also prove theoretically that a set of test vectors generated for single charge-sharing faults (SCSFs) can also detect all multiple charge-sharing faults (MCSFs). This good property significantly guarantees the test quality for the CS faults of domino circuits.