Designing asynchronous standby circuits for a low-power pager

Author

Kessels, Joep ; Marston, Paul

Author_Institution

Philips Res. Lab., Eindhoven, Netherlands

Volume

87

Issue

2

fYear

1999

fDate

2/1/1999 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

257

Lastpage

267

Abstract

We have designed asynchronous standby circuits for a pager decoder which dissipate four times less power and are 40% larger in size than synchronous designs. For the total pager unit this means a 37% reduction in power dissipation for nearly no additional area. The decoded chip, which apart from the standby circuits is completely synchronous, has been fabricated and was first-time-right. Two problems had to be solved to incorporate asynchronous subcircuits in a synchronous environment: synchronization and testing. A synchronization scheme is described that allows a free intermixing of asynchronous and synchronous modules and a test strategy is proposed in which the scan test facilities in the synchronous environment are used to test the asynchronous modules. One function is prevalent in the standby circuits, namely counting. In an appendix we present the asynchronous design of a so-called loadable counter whose power consumption does not depend on its size

Keywords

CMOS logic circuits; VLSI; asynchronous circuits; circuit CAD; decoding; integrated circuit design; integrated circuit testing; logic CAD; logic testing; low-power electronics; paging communication; synchronisation; Tangram; asynchronous design; asynchronous standby circuits; asynchronous subcircuits; loadable counter; low-power pager; pager decoder; power dissipation reduction; scan test facilities; synchronization scheme; synchronous decoder chip; synchronous environment; test strategy; Asynchronous circuits; Circuit testing; Decoding; Energy consumption; Power dissipation; Radiation detectors; Telephone sets; Telephony; Test facilities; Very large scale integration;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Proceedings of the IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9219

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/5.740019

Filename

740019