CMOS circuit design for minimum dynamic power and highest speed

A new low-power design method produces CMOS circuits that consume the least dynamic power at the highest speed permitted under the technology constraint. A gate is characterized by an inertial delay and separate delays between its inputs and output. The technology constraint, related to feasible ranges of lengths and widths of transistors, is specified by a parameter u_b. It is the upper bound on the difference between the input to output delays corresponding to any pair of inputs of a gate. We formulate a linear program (LP) whose size is proportional to the circuit size. This LP determines the inertial delay as well as input to output delays for each gate of the circuit with the given u_b, such that all glitches are eliminated and the overall delay of the circuit is minimized. Because of the additional flexibility in specifying gate delays, the glitch suppression is guaranteed without any delay buffers. Hence this design consumes less power than those designed by other methods. We designed the circuit c1355 with 46% of the original power dissipation compared to a reference design. A previously published method, that characterizes each gate with a single delay, produced a c1355 circuit consuming 58% of the original power. Both low-power circuits had the same overall delay. The previous design required 224 delay buffers, whereas the new design needed none.