Compact and power efficient MOS-NDR Muller C-elements

Abstract

Recently there is a renewed interest in the development of transistor circuits which emulate the Negative Differential Resistance (NDR) exhibited by different emerging devices like Resonant Tunneling Diodes (RTDs). These MOS-NDR circuits easily allow the prototyping of design concepts and techniques developed for such NDR devices. The importation of those concepts into transistor technologies can result in circuit realizations which are advantageous for some functionalities and application fields. This paper describes a Muller C-element which illustrates this statement which is inspired in an RTD-based topology. The required RTD is implemented by means of the MOS-NDR device. A 4-input Muller C-element has been fabricated and experimentally validated. The proposed circuit compares favorably with respect to a well-known conventional gate realization. © 2012 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.