A high-speed and ultra-low-voltage divide-by-4/5 counter with dynamic floating input D flip-flop (DFIDFF) is presented in this paper. The proposed DFIDFF and control logic gates are merged to reduce effective capacitance of internal and external nodes, and increase the operating speed of divide-by-4/5 counter. The proposed divide-by-4/5 counter is fabricated in a 0.13-µm CMOS process. The measured maximum operating frequency and power consumption of the counter are 600 MHz and 8.35 µW at a 0.5 V supply voltage. HSPICE simulations demonstrate that the proposed counter (divide-by-4) reduces power-delay product (PDP) by 37%, 71%, and 57% from those of the TGFF counter, Yang's counter [1], and the E-TSPC counter [2], respectively.

Decreased power dissipation and transient voltage drops in CMOS power distribution networks are important for high-speed deep submicrometer CMOS integrated circuits. In this paper, three CMOS buffers based on the charge-transfer, split-path and bootstrapped techniques to reduce the power dissipation and transient voltage drop in power supply are proposed. First, the inverted-delay-unit is used in the low-power inverted-delay-unit (LPID) CMOS buffer to eliminate the short-circuit current of the output stage. Second, the low-swing bootstrapped feedback-controlled split-path (LBFS) CMOS buffer is proposed to eliminate the short-circuit current of the output stage by using the feedback-controlled split-path method. The dynamic power dissipation of the LBFS CMOS buffer can be reduced by limiting the gate voltage swing of the output stage. Moreover, the propagation delay of the LBFS CMOS buffer is also reduced by non-full-swing gate voltage of the output stage. Third, the charge-recovery scheme is used in the charge-transfer feedback-controlled 4-split-path (CRFS) CMOS buffer to recovery and pull up the gate voltage of the output stage for reducing power-delay product and power line noise. Based on HSPICE simulation results, the power-delay product and the transient voltage drop in power supply of the proposed three CMOS buffers can be reduced by 20% to 40% as compared to conventional CMOS tapered buffer under various capacitive load.

A proposed pseudo fractional-N clock generator with 50% duty cycle output is presented by using the pseudo fractional-N controller for SoC chips and the dynamic frequency scaling applications. The different clock frequencies can be generated with the particular phase combinations of a four-stage voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO). It has been fabricated in a 0.13 µm CMOS technology, and work with a supply voltage of 1.2 V. According to measured results, the frequency range of the proposed pseudo fractional-N clock generator is from 71.4 MHz to 1 GHz and the peak-to-peak jitter is less than 5% of the output period. Duty cycle error rates of the output clock frequencies are from 0.8% to 2% and the measured power dissipation of the pseudo fractional-N controller is 146 µW at 304 MHz.