A CONCEPT OF ANALOG-DIGITAL MERGED CIRCUIT ARCHITECTURE FOR FUTURE VLSIS

This paper describes the new analog-digital merged circuit architectur e which utilizes the pulse modulation signals. By reconsidering the in formation representing and processing principles, and the circuit oper ations governed by the physical law, the new circuit architecture is p roposed to overcome the limitations of existent VLSI technologies. The proposed architecture utilizes the pulse width modulation (PWM) signa l which has analog information in the time domain, and be constructed with the novel PWM circuits which carry out the multi-input arithmetic operations, the signal conversions and the data storage. It has a pot ential to exploit the high speed switching capability of deep sub-mu m devices, and to reduce the number of devices and the power dissipatio n to one-tenth of those of the binary digital circuits. Therefore it w ill effectively implement the intelligent processing systems utilizing 0.5-0.2 mu m scaled CMOS devices.