Low Delay-Power Product Current-Mode Multiple Valued Logic for Delay-Insensitive Data Transfer Mechanism

Conventional delay-insensitive (DI) data encodings require 2N+1 wires for transferring N-bit. To reduce complexity and power dissipation of wires in designing a large scaled chip, a DI data transfer mechanism based on current-mode multiple valued logic (CMMVL), where N-bit data transfer can be performed with only N+1 wires, is proposed. The effectiveness of the proposed data transfer mechanism is validated by comparisons with conventional data transfer mechanisms using dual-rail and 1-of-4 encodings through simulation at the 0.25-μm CMOS technology. Simulation results with wire lengths of 4 mm or larger demonstrate that the CMMVL scheme significantly reduces delay-power product values of the dual-rail encoding with data rate of 5 MHz or more and the 1-of-4 encoding with data rate of 18 MHz or more. key words: delay-insensitive data transfer, globally asynchronous locally synchronous system, current-mode multiple valued logic