Implementation of voltage-mode/current-mode hybrid circuits for a low-power fine-grain reconfigurable VLSI

This paper proposes low-power voltage-mode/current-mode hybrid circuits to realize an arbitrary two-variable logic function and a full-adder function. The voltage and current mode can be selected for low-power operations at low and high frequency, respectively, according to speed requirement. An nMOS pass transistor network is shared to realize voltage switching and current steering for the voltage- and current-mode operations, respectively, which leads to high utilization of the hardware resources. As a result, when the operating frequency is more than 1.15 GHz, the current mode of the hybrid logic circuit is more power-efficient than the voltage mode. Otherwise, the voltage mode is more power-efficient. The power consumption of the hybrid two-variable logic circuit is lower than that of the conventional two-input look-up table (LUT) using CMOS transmission gates, when the operating frequency is more than 800 MHz. The delay and area of the hybrid two-variable logic circuit are increased by only 7% and 13%, respectively.