Low Power Pulse-Triggered Flip-Flop Based on Clock Triggering Edge Control Technique

Abstract

Flip-flop is an important unit in digital integrated circuits, whose characteristics have a deep impact on the performance of the circuits. To reduce the power dissipation of flip-flops, clock triggering edge control technique is proposed, which is feasible to block one or two triggering edges of a clock cycle if they are redundant in dual-edge pulse-triggered flip-flops (DEPFFs). Based on this technique, redundant pulses can be suppressed when the input stays unchanged, and all the redundant triggerings are eliminated to reduce redundant transitions at the internal nodes of the flip-flop, so the power dissipation can be decreased. Then a novel DEPFF based on clock triggering edge control (DEPFF-CEC) technique is proposed. Based on the SMIC 65-nm technology, the post layout simulation results show that the proposed DEPFF-CEC gains an improvement of 8.03–39.83% in terms of power dissipation when the input switching activity is 10%, as compared with its counterparts. Thus, it is suitable for energy-efficient designs whose input data switching activity is low.