Estimation of Power Dissipation in Glitching Using Complex-time Cellular Automata

A new method for estimating the glitching contribution to the power dissipation of multilevel combinational logic circuits based on complex-time cellular automata is presented for the first time. To bridge the gap between continuous time, in which the combinational logic circuits operate, and the discrete time, in which cellular automata operate, the concept of complex time is introduced. Both the logic combinational circuit and the cellular automaton model that simulates it, are assumed to exist in a linear complex space, where the real part of the complex time is the continuous time and the imaginary part is the discrete time. Using the complex time concept the proposed model can take full advantage of both the powerful local operation capabilities of cellular automata, and the convenient formulation of VLSI circuit description using two-dimensional matrices and netlists.