2015 Volume E98.A Issue 12 Pages 2600-2606
In this paper, we propose a low-power circuit-shared static flip-flop (CS2FF) for extremely low power digital VLSIs. The CS2FF consists of five static NORs and two inverters (INVs). The CS2FF utilizes a positive edge of a buffered clock signal, which is generated from a root clock, to take data into a master latch and a negative edge of the root clock to hold the data in a slave latch. The total number of transistors is only 24, which is the same as the conventional transmission-gate flip flop (TGFF) used in the most standard cell libraries. SPICE simulations in 0.18-µm standard CMOS process demonstrated that our proposed CS2FF achieved clock-to-Q delay of 18.3ns, setup time of 10.0ns, hold time of 5.5ns, and power dissipation of 9.7nW at 1-MHz clock frequency and 0.5-V power supply. The physical design area increased by 16% and power dissipation was reduced by 13% compared with those of conventional TGFF. Measurement results demonstrated that our proposed CS2FF can operate at 0.352V with extremely low energy of 5.93fJ.