Implementation and evaluation of a fine-grain multiple-valued field programmable VLSI based on source-coupled logic

This paper describes a design of a fine-grain multiple-valued field-programmable VLSI (MV-FPVLSI) based on multiple-valued source-coupled logic (MVSCL). An MV-FPVLSI consists of identical cells, each of which is connected to 8-neighborhood ones through 1-bit switch block for each direction. An arbitrary 2-variable binary logic operation is realized using threshold logic gates. Using 0.35 μm standard CMOS design rule, a bit-serial adder is designed using the MV-FPVLSI. Using HSPICE simulation tools, a cell is evaluated and compared with corresponding binary implementation. Comparison results show that, under normalized power consumption better performance can be achieved if the linear summation with weight 1 of the input currents is possible. Moreover, the area of a cell can be reduced to 24% without any degradation in performance. That is, highly-parallel operations can be done using the MV-FPVLSI under total chip area constraint.