A 1-V HIGH-SPEED MTCMOS CIRCUIT SCHEME FOR POWER-DOWN APPLICATION CIRCUITS

This paper proposes a new multithreshold-voltage CMOS circuit (MTCMOS) concept aimed at achieving highspeed, ultralow-power large-scale inte grators (LSI's) for battery-driven portable equipment, The ''balloon'' circuit scheme based on this concept preserves data during the power- down period in which the power supply to the circuit is cut off in ord er to reduce the standby power, Low-power, high-speed performance is a chieved by the small preserving circuit which can be separated from th e critical path of the logic circuit, This preserving circuit is not o nly three times faster than a conventional MTCMOS one, but it consumes half the power and takes up half the area, Using this scheme for an L SI chip, 20-MHz operation at 1.0 V and only a few mi standby current w as achieved with 0.5-mu m CMOS technology, Moreover, this scheme is ef fective for high-speed and low-power operation in quarter-micrometer a nd finer devices.