Three-phase dual-rail pre-charge logic

Abstract

This paper investigates the design of a dual-rail pre-charge logic family whose power consumption is insensitive to unbalanced load conditions thus allowing adopting a semi-custom design flow (automatic place & route) without any constraint on the routing of the complementary wires. The proposed logic is based on a three phase operation where, in order to obtain a constant energy consumption over the operating cycle, an additional discharge phase is performed after pre-charge and evaluation. In this work, the proposed concept has been implemented as an enhancement of the SABL logic with a limited increase in circuit complexity. Implementation details and simulation results are reported which show a power consumption independent of the sequence of processed data and load capacitances. An improvement in the energy consumption balancing up to 100 times with respect to SABL has been obtained. © International Association for Cryptologic Research 2006.