A bandgap reference (BGR) and sub1V BGR circuits for Picowatt LSIs is proposed here. The circuits pertains pico-ampere current reference circuit, a bipolar transistor, and proportional-to-absolute-temperature (PTAT) voltage generators. The circuits neglect resistors and contain only MOSFETs and one bipolar transistor. As the sub-BGR circuit divides the output voltage of the bipolar transistor ...

Scaling supply voltage is an efficient technique to achieve low power-delay product. This study presents low-power Single-Rail MOS Current Mode Logic (SRMCML) circuits which operate on near-threshold region. The near-threshold operations for the basic SRMCML circuits such as inverter/buffer, OR2/NOR2 and 2/NAND2, OR3/NOR3 and XOR3/NXOR3 are investigated. All circuits are simulated with HSPICE a...

Lowering supply voltage of FinFET circuits is an effective way to achieve low power dissipations. In this paper, the super-threshold adiabatic FinFET circuits based on PAL-2N operating on medium strong inversion regions are addressed in terms of energy consumption and operating frequency. The supply voltage of the super-threshold circuits is much larger than the threshold voltage of the transis...

Detecting patterns in strings and images is a fundamental and well studied problem. We study the circuit complexity of the string matching problem under two popular choices of gates: De Morgan and threshold gates. For strings of length n and patterns of length log n k ≤ n− o(n), we prove super polynomial lower bounds for De Morgan circuits of depth 2, and nearly linear lower bounds for depth 2 ...

Weighted threshold functions with positive weights are a natural generalization of unweighted threshold functions. These functions are clearly monotone. However, the naive way of computing them is adding the weights of the satisfied variables and checking if the sum is greater than the threshold; this algorithm is inherently non-monotone since addition is a non-monotone function. In this work w...

We prove that the modulus function MODm of n variables can be computed by a threshold circuit C of energy e and size s = O(e(n/m)1/(e−1)) for any integer e ≥ 2, where the energy e is defined to be the maximum number of gates outputting “1” over all inputs to C, and the size s to be the number of gates in C. Our upper bound on the size s almost matches the known lower bound s = Ω(e(n/m)1/e). We ...

Near threshold circuits (NTC) are an attractive and promising technology that provides significant power savings with some delay penalty. The combination of NTC technology with MOS current mode logic (MCML) is examined in this work. By combining MCML with NTC, the constant power consumption of MCML is reduced to leakage power levels that can be tolerated in certain modern applications. Addition...

1 This research was supported in part by DARPA PAC/C program under contract DAAB07-02-C-P302 and by NSF under grant no. 9988441. ABSTRACT Leakage power and hot-carrier effects are emerging as key concerns in deep sub-micron CMOS technologies with respect to their effects on the total power dissipation and reliability of VLSI circuits. Leakage power dissipation is rapidly becoming a substantial ...