High-Speed Low-Power MCML Nanometer Circuits with Near-Threshold Computing

In this paper, the standard cells of the high-speed low-power MCML circuits with near-threshold computing are developed. The basic MCML standard cells include buffer/inverter, AND/NAND, XOR/XNOR, multiplexer, and full adder. The layout, abstract design and standard-cell characters of near-threshold MCML basic cells are described at a NCSU FreePDK 45nm technology. The 2-bit multiplier is verified by using the MCML cells. For normal supply voltage, the MCML basic gates can save more energy and have better performance than the traditional CMOS counterparts at 1GHz or higher operation frequencies. Near-threshold computing for MCML circuits is investigated by scaling down the supply voltage. The results show that the power consumption of MCML circuits that operate on near-threshold regions can be reduced without performance degrading.