Design of a low-power pulse-triggered flip-flop with conditional clock technique

Flip-flops are basic sequential elements in digital circuits and they have a deep impact on the performance of the circuits. In order to reduce the redundant transitions at internal nodes of the flip-flop, a conditional clock technique is proposed, and then a conditional clock pulse-triggered flip-flop (CCFF) based on this technique is designed. In CCFF, the clock is blocked when the input remains unchanged so that the internal nodes will not switch with the clock, which reduces the power consumption effectively. Based on the TSMC 0.18μm technology, the post-layout simulation results show that the proposed CCFF has an obvious advantage in power consumption when the data switching activity factor is below 50% as compared with other state-of-the-art pulse-triggered flip-flops, and the power saving is more than 50% when the activity factor is 10%.