Static-switching pulse domino: A switching-aware design technique for wide fan-in dynamic multiplexers

In wide fan-in dynamic multiplexers, the two phase evaluate-precharge operation leads to high switching activity at the dynamic and the output nodes introducing a significant power penalty. To address this issue, the switching-aware design techniques are being explored but these existing techniques suffer from design inflexibilities. In this paper, we propose a pulse domino switching-aware technique, called SSPD, to reduce the overall power consumption of a wide fan-in dynamic gate by having static-like switching behavior at the dynamic node, and the gate input/output terminals. A conditional pulse generator is also proposed, which enables the SSPD multiplexers to be easily adapted to a wide set of noise and delay specifications. Simulation results of 8-bit and 16-bit dynamic multiplexers designed and simulated in a 1.2-V 90-nm CMOS process show that the SSPD technique can reduce the average power by up to 21% and 36%, respectively, when compared to the conventional footless domino technique.