Built in Self Test Based Design of Wave-Pipelined Circuits in ASICs

Wave-pipelining enables digital systems to be operated at higher frequencies by properly selecting the clock periods and clock skews so as to latch the output of combinational logic circuits at stable periods. In the literature, only trial and error and manual procedures are adopted for these selections. The major contribution of this paper is the proposal for automating the above procedure for the ASIC implementation of wave pipelined circuits using built in self test approach. For the purpose of verification, a Coordinate rotation digital computer and filters using the distributed arithmetic algorithm are implemented. To test the efficacy, these circuits are implemented by adopting three schemes: wave-pipelining, pipelining and non-pipelining. From the implementation results, it is observed that the wave-pipelined circuits are 21-29% faster compared to non-pipelined circuits. The pipelined circuits are 22-48% faster compared to wave-pipelined circuits but at the cost of about 18-28% increase in area.