Performance of CMOS ternary full adder at liquid nitrogen temperature

Abstract

We have designed, implemented and studied the performance at liquid nitrogen temperature (77 K) of a CMOS ternary full adder and its building blocks, the simple ternary inverter (STI), positive ternary inverter (PTI) and negative ternary inverter (NTI), and compared the corresponding performance at room temperature (300 K). The ternary full adder has been fabricated in 2 μm, n-well CMOS through MOSIS. In a ternary full adder, the basic building blocks, the PTI and NTI, have been developed using combinations of a CMOS inverter and transmission gate(s). There is close agreement between the simulated and measured voltage transfer characteristics and noise margins of ternary-valued devices. The measured transient times for the NTI, PTI and ternary full adder at 77 K show an improvement by a factor of ≈1.5–2.5 over the corresponding values at 300 K. The present design does not use linear resistors and depletion-mode MOSFETs to implement the ternary full adder and its building blocks, and is fully compatible with current CMOS technology.