A survey for pass-transistor logic technologies-recent researches and developments and future prospects

The objective of this embedded tutorial is to give an overview for the state of the art of the pass-transistor logic technologies and their future prospects. The paper gives a survey summary for recent researches and developments on the pass-transistor logic technologies based on more than 100 surveyed papers that have been published after 1983. The number of publications has been rapidly increased after 1995, which shows recent quick growth of research activities. The survey includes several different viewpoints, such as circuit technologies, design and synthesis methodologies, applications and commercial use, etc. The circuit technologies and synthesis methodologies are roughly grouped into two categories, one of which has a close relation to BDD, while the other does not. Circuit technologies are also categorized into different axes, such as differential structure or single-rail structure, NMOS pass-transistors or CMOS, static circuits or dynamic, etc. Features of each pass-transistor logic family are explained along with these classification axes. For the most recent topics, commercial products by Japanese companies and cell/tool businesses in venture business companies in US are also reported. Several recent papers made performance comparisons of pass-transistor logic and CMOS, that are also reported with a discussion of future prospects