Conventional logic circuit designs are based on fully complementary CMOS logic circuits. In the past decade, many Pass-Transistor Logic (PTL) circuits have been proposed that are claimed to have better performance in area, speed and power. Most current PTL logic circuits are composed of a limited number of basic PTL cells (say 2 to 5 types of cells only). However, current placement-and-routing (P&R) CAD tools are mainly designed based on CMOS cell library which usually contains many cells with different logic functions. Thus the P&R tool does not fully exploit the features of the synthesized PTL gate-level netlists. In this thesis, we present a P&R tool dedicated to the generation of the final physical layout for the PTL netlists that are generated from a PTL synthesizer. This backend tool considers the efficient placement and routing of the PTL cells in order to reduce the area cost and to reduce the impact of the interconnection wirings on speed and power performances. Besides, in this thesis, the critical paths of the PTL netlists will be identified and the corresponding input patterns to activate these critical paths will be generated for post-layout speed simulation using HSPICE or Nanosim. In summary, the layout generator in this thesis performs the P&R of PTL netlists and also automatically find the critical paths and their corresponding input patterns.

This thesis proposes a new variable-order prediction method to predict the Shannon expansion order during the BDD tree generator. Combining this method with the original minimum width method, we can generator a better BDD tree to be used in our pass-transistor logic synthesizer. Also we propose two partitioning methods to reduce the length of the critical paths. The first method can effectively reduce the critical path delay at the cost of much higher area cost. The second method explores the common factors in the Boolean functions to reduce the critical path delay with reasonably increased area cost. Furthermore, we discuss the methods of inserting regenerating inverters/buffers along the path in BDD tree by selecting inverter cells and MUX cells of proper driving strength to optimize the area/cost/power performance. Finally, the automatic layout generation is considered to produce the physical layout more efficiently compared with that using commericial automatic place-and-route tools.

As transistor sizes scale down and levels of integration increase, leakage power has become a critical problem in modern low-power microprocessors. This is especially true for ultra-low-voltage (ULV) circuits, where high levels of leakage force designers to chose relatively high threshold voltages, which limits performance. In this thesis, an industry-standard technique known as power-gating is explored, whereby transistors are used to disconnect the power from idle portions of a chip. Present power-gating implementations suffer from limitations including non-zero off-state leakage, which can aggregate to a large amount of wasted energy during long idle periods, and high energy overhead, which limits its use to long-term system-wide sleep modes. As this thesis will show however, by vastly increasing the effectiveness of power-gating through the use of emerging technologies, and by implementing aggressive hardware-oriented power-gating policies, leakage in microprocessors can be eliminated to a large extent. This allows the threshold voltage to be lowered, leading to ULV microprocessors with both low switching energy and high performance. The first emerging technology investigated is the Nanoelectromechnical-Systems (NEMS) switch, which is a CMOS-compatible mechanical relay with near-infinite off-resistance and low on-resistance. When used for power-gating, this switch completely eliminates off-state leakage, yet is compact enough to be contained on die. This has tremendous benefits for applications with long sleep times. For example, a NEMS-power-gated architecture performing an FFT per hour consumes 30 times less power than a transistor-power-gated architecture. Additionally, the low on-resistance can lower power-gating area overhead by 36-83\%. The second technology targets the high energy overhead associated with powering a circuit on and off. This thesis demonstrates that a new logic style specifically designed for ULV operation, Sense Amplifier Pass Transistor Logic (SAPTL), requires power-gates that are 8-10 times smaller, and consumes up to 15 times less boot-up energy, compared to static-CMOS. These abilities enable effective power-gating of an SAPTL circuit, even for very short idle periods. Microprocessor simulations demonstrate that a fine-grained power-gating policy, along with this drastically lower overhead, can result in up to a 44\% drop in energy. Encompassing these investigations is an energy estimation framework built around a cycle-accurate microprocessor simulator, which allows a wide range of circuit and power-gating parameters to be optimized. This framework implements two hardware-based power-gating schedulers that are completely invisible to the OS, and have extremely low hardware overhead, allowing for a large number of power-gated regions. All together, this thesis represents the most complete and forward-looking study on power-gating in the ULV region. The results demonstrate that aggressive power-gating allows designers to leverage the very low switching energy of ULV operation, while achieving performance levels that can greatly expand the capabilities of energy-constrained systems. / Ph. D.

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.