Current-Comparison-Based Domino: New Low-Leakage High-Speed Domino Circuit for Wide Fan-In Gates

Abstract

In this paper, a new domino circuit is proposed, which has a lower leakage and higher noise immunity without dramatic speed degradation for wide fan-in gates. The technique which is utilized in this paper is based on comparison of mirrored current of the pull-up network with its worst case leakage current. The proposed circuit technique decreases the parasitic capacitance on the dynamic node, yielding a smaller keeper for wide fan-in gates to implement fast and robust circuits. Thus, the contention current and consequently power consumption and delay are reduced. The leakage current is also decreased by exploiting the footer transistor in diode configuration, which results in increased noise immunity. Simulation results of wide fan-in gates designed using a 16-nm high-performance predictive technology model demonstrate 51% power reduction and at least 2.41t noise-immunity improvement at the same delay compared to the standard domino circuits for 64-bit OR gates.