The first topic of this thesis is a practical load-optimized VCO design for low-jitter 5V 500 MHz digital phase-locked loop. Besides the low jitter advantage, the design also possesses another feature, i.e., fast locked time. The second topic is the half-swing PLA circuit. An additional 1/2 VDD voltage source and buffering transmission gates are inserted between the NOR planes of PLAs to erase the racing problem and shorten the rise delay as well as the fall delay of the output response such that the speed is enhanced and the dynamic power is reduced. The third topic is a novel design of a the 1.0 GHz pipelining 8-bit CLA based on the architecture we mentioned in the second topic. The operating clock frequency is 1.0 GHz and the output of the addition of two 8-bit binary numbers is done in 2 cycles ( 2.0 ns ).

The first part of this thesis presents a novel design for DRAMs to provide self-refreshing cycles which vary with temperature dynamically to reduce power dissipation in a standby mode. The proposed design monitors the data loss of a memory cell which is resulted from the leakage current, and then adjusts the period of the self-refreshing cycles. The second part presents two fast half-swing CMOS circuits for NOR-NOR PLA implementation. An additional 1/2VDD voltage source and buffering transmission gates are inserted between the NOR planes of PLAs to erase the racing problem and shorten the rise delay as well as the fall delay of the output response such that the speed is enhanced.