Half-Swing Clocking Scheme for 75% Power Saving in Clocking Circuitry

Hirotsugu KOJIMA  Satoshi TANAKA  Katsuro SASAKI  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Electronics   Vol.E78-C   No.6   pp.680-683
Publication Date: 1995/06/25
Online ISSN: 
DOI: 
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Issue on the 1994 VLSI Circuits Symposium (Joint Issue with the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, Vol. 30, No. 4 April 1995))
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Summary: 
We propose a half-swing clocking scheme that allows us to reduce power consumption of clocking circuitry by as much as 75%, because all the clock signal swings are reduced to half of the LSI supply voltage. The new clocking scheme causes quite small speed degradation, because the random logic circuits in the critical path are still supplied by the full supply voltage. We also propose a clock driver which supplies half-swing clock and generates half VDD by itself. We confirmed that the half-swing clocking scheme provided 67% power saving in a test chip fabricated with 0.5 µm CMOS device, ideally 75%, in the clocking circuitry, and that the degradation in speed was only 0.5 ns by circuit simulation. The key to the proposed clocking scheme is the concept that the voltage swing is reduced only for clocking circuitry, but is retained for all other circuits in the chip. This results in significant power reduction with minimal speed degradation.