Wireless sensor networks (WSN) play an important role in today’s monitoring and controlsystems like environmental monitoring, military surveillance, industrial sensing and control, smarthome systems and tracking systems. As the application of WSN grows by leaps and bounds, there is anincreasing demand in placing a larger number of sensors and controllers to meet the requirements. Theincreased number of sensors necessitates flexibility in the functioning of nodes. Nodes in wirelesssensor networks should be capable of being dynamically reconfigured to perform various tasks is theneed of the hour.In order to achieve flexibility in node functionality, it is common to adopt reconfigurablearchitecture for WSN nodes. FPGA-based architectures are popular reconfigurable architectures bywhich WSN nodes can be programmed to take up different roles across time. Area and power are themajor overheads in FPGA based architectures, where interconnect consumes more power and area thanlogic cells. The contemporary WSN standard requires longer battery life and micro size nodes for easyplacement and maintenance-free operation for years together.Three solutions have been studied and evaluated to approach this problem: 1) Homogenousembedded FPGA platform, 2) Power gated reconfigurable finite state machines and 3) Pass transistorlogic (PTL) based reconfigurable finite state machines. Embedded FPGA is a CMOS 65nm customdeveloped small homogenous FPGA which holds the functionality of the WSN nodes and it will bedynamically reconfigured from time to time to change the functionality of the node. In Power gatedreconfigurable FSM architecture, the functionality of the node is expressed in the form of finite statemachines, which will be implemented in a LUT based power gated design. In PTL based reconfigurablefinite state machine architecture, the finite state machines are completely realized using PTL basedcustom designed sets of library components. Low power configuration memory is used to dynamicallyreconfigure the design with various FSMs at different times.

The mainstream of current VLSI design and logic synthesis is based on traditional CMOS logic circuits. However, in the past two decades, various new logic circuit design styles based on pass-transistor logic (PTL) have been proposed. Compared with CMOS circuits, these PTL-based circuits are claimed to have better results in area, speed, and power in some particular applications, such as adder and multiplier designs. Since most current automatic logic synthesis tools (such as Synopsys Design Compiler) are based on conventional CMOS standard cell library, the corresponding logic minimization for CMOS logic cannot be directly employed to generate efficient PTL circuits. In this dissertation, we develop two novel PTL synthesizers that can efficiently generate PTL-based circuits. One is based on pure PTL cells; the other mixes CMOS and PTL cells in the standard cell library to achieve better performance in area, speed, and power. Since PTL-based circuits are constructed by only a few basic PTL cells, the layouts in PTL cells can be easily updated to design large SoC systems as the process technology migrates rapidly in current Nano technology era. The proposed PTL logic synthesis flows employ the popular Synopsys Design Compiler (DC) to perform logic translation and minimization based on the standard cell library composed of PTL and CMOS cells, thus, the PTL design flow can be easily embedded in the standard cell-based ASIC design flow. In this dissertation, we also discuss PTL-based designs of some fundamental hardware components. Furthermore, the proposed PTL cell library is used to synthesize large processor systems in applications of computer arithmetic and 3D graphics.