Design of CMOS tapered buffer for minimum power-delay product

The tapered buffer is analyzed from the viewpoint of power dissipation. Both uniform and nonuniform tapered buffers are considered. It is found that there is an optimum value of tapering factor for a minimum power-delay product. In case of uniform tapering, we can obtain an analytical solution of the optimum tapering factor for a minimum power-delay product, which is about 1.5~2 times larger than that for a minimum propagation delay. It is also found that there exists a nonuniform tapering factor which gives a global optimum condition for a minimum power-delay product, which, however, results in a larger short-circuit current. Compared with a uniform buffer, a nonuniform tapered buffer shows about 8% improvement in dynamic switching energy, and 3~5% improvement in total switching energy. We confirm this by simulating tapered buffers with SPICE