Low-power multiple-valued current-mode integrated circuit with current-source control and its application

A new current-source control technique is proposed to design a low-power high-speed multiple-valued current-mode (MVCM) integrated circuit in a low supply voltage. The use of a differential logic circuit (DLC) with a pair of dual-rail inputs makes the input voltage swing small, which results in a high driving capability at a lower supply voltage, while having large static power dissipation. In the proposed DLC using switched current control, the static power dissipation is greatly reduced because current sources in non-active circuit blocks are switched off. In the current control, no additional transistors are required to control the current sources because a current-control circuit is already used in the threshold detector. As a typical example of arithmetic circuits, a new 1.5 V-supply 54×54-bit multiplier based on a 0.8 μm standard CMOS technology is also designed. Its performance is about 1.3 times faster than that of a binary fastest multiplier under the normalized power dissipation.