Design and experimental results of a CMOS flip-flop featuring embedded threshold logic

This paper describes a semi-dynamic CMOS flip-flop family featuring embedded threshold logic functions. First, we present the concept of a flip-flop featuring embedded threshold logic, and then we describe the circuit and its operation. Subsequently, we present the design issues and the experimental results of such threshold logic flip-flops, obtained in 0.25 μm CMOS technology. It is shown in this paper that we successfully manufactured and tested flip-flops having embedded threshold functions with up to 16 data inputs. The proposed flip-flop featuring embedded threshold logic is very suitable for high-performance pipelined arithmetic units since this feature greatly reduces the pipeline overhead, by allowing the elimination of one or more levels of logic from the path leading to the flip-flop.