Boost Logic: A High Speed Energy Recovery Circuit Family

In this paper, we propose Boost Logic, a logic family which relies on voltage scaling, gate overdrive and energy recovery techniques to achieve high energy efficiency at frequencies in the GHz range. The key feature of our design is the use of an energy recovering “boost ” stage to provide an efficient gate overdrive to a highly voltage scaled logic at near threshold supply voltage. We have evaluated our logic family using post-layout simulation of an 8-bit pipelined array multiplier in a ¢¤£¦¥¨§� © m CMOS process with ���� � =340mV. At 1.6GHz and a 1.3V supply voltage, the Boost multiplier dissipates 8.11pJ per computation. Comparing results from post-layout simulations of boost and voltage-scaled conventional multipliers, our proposed logic achieves 68 % energy savings with respect to static CMOS. Using low � �� � devices, Boost Logic has been verified to operate at 2GHz with a 1.25V voltage supply and 8.5pJ energy dissipation per cycle.