CMOS VLSI Low-Power Design

Power dissipation is a critical parameter in digital design for the implementation of high performance portable, battery operated systems, such as wireless communications systems. Clocked or synchronous digital designs consume a significant amount of power associated with coordinating the operation of millions of transistors at GHz clock rates. Besides, the operating speed of such systems is limited by the slowest functional logic unit. By contrast, asynchronous designs are active only when doing useful work, enabling considerable savings in power and operating at the average speed of all components. Yet, the overhead associated with the asynchronous control units implementing the handshaking protocol, in terms of silicon area, speed and power, as well as the lack of Computer Aided Design (CAD) tools for use in such designs have limited the use of asynchronous techniques. In this book, the author describes the concept and challenges of asynchronous VLSI CMOS circuit design and presents a complete design methodology to overcome such challenges via the design and implementation of a 64-state, 1/2-rate Viterbi decoder suitable for wireless communications applications.