Low Swing — Low Frequency Rotary Traveling Wave Oscillators

摘要

This paper presents the design and implementation of low-swing, low-frequency rotary traveling wave oscillators (RT-WOs). Low-swing rotary clocks are designed to operate with low-swing D flip-flops. A methodology is proposed to perform dynamic frequency scaling for integer division ratios of 3 to n to generate low-frequency rotary clocks at target frequencies. SPICE-based experiments are performed on the ISPD'10 benchmark circuits operating at 100 MHz, 200 MHz, and 500 MHz. The low-swing, low-frequency resonant rotary clock based designs are compared against full-swing and low-swing traditional designs operating at the same frequency and voltage level. The results show that the low-swing rotary clock based ISPD'10 designs at 500 MHz consume 61% and 43% lower power on comparison to the traditional full-swing and low-swing designs, respectively, where the traditional designs are implemented with a PLL, and a bounded-skew tree.