Hyoun Soo Park

Level Up/Down Converter with Single Power-Supply Voltage for Multi-VDD Systems

For battery-powered device applications, which grow rapidly in the electronic market today, low-power becomes one of the most important design issues of CMOS VLSI circuits. A multi-VDD system, which uses more than one power-supply voltage in the same system, is an effective way to reduce the power consumption without degrading operating speed. However, in the multi-VDD system, level converters should be inserted to prevent a large static current flow for the low-to-high conversion. The insertion of the level converters induces the overheads of power consumption, delay, and area. In this paper, we propose a new level converter which can provide the level up/down conversions for the various input and output voltages. Since the proposed level converter uses only one power-supply voltage, it has an advantage of reducing the complexity in physical design. In addition, the proposed level converter provides lower power and higher speed, compared to existing level converters.

Image Adaptive Incremental Subfield Coding for Plasma Display Panels

In this letter, we propose a new approach to incremental coding of the subfield codes for plasma display panels (PDPs). The proposed approach suppresses the halftone noise of the PDPs, while completely eliminating false contour noise, as do existing incremental subfield codes, by selecting an optimal incremental subfield code adaptively for a given input image. The proposed method maps the problem of selecting the optimal incremental subfield code onto a special-case shortest path problem. Results of experiment using 109 sample images illustrated that the proposed method improved the average peak signal-to-noise ratio by 4.4-6.2 dB in halftone noise compared with existing incremental subfield coding methods.

Timing Criticality for Timing Yield Optimization

Block-based SSTA analyzes the timing variation of a chip caused by process variations effectively. However, block-based SSTA cannot identify critical nodes, nodes that highly influence the timing yield of a chip, used as the effective guidance of timing yield optimization. In this paper, we propose a new timing criticality to identify those nodes, referred to as the timing yield criticality (TYC). The proposed TYC is defined as the change in the timing yield, which is induced by the change in the mean arrival time at a node. For efficiency, we estimate the TYC through linear approximation instead of propagating the changed arrival time at a node to its fanouts. In experiments using the ISCAS 85 benchmark circuits, the proposed method estimated TYCs with the expense of 9.8% of the runtime for the exact computation. The proposed method identified the node that gives the greatest effect on the timing yield in all benchmark circuits, except C6288, while existing methods did not identify that for any circuit. In addition, the proposed method identified 98.4% of the critical nodes in the top 1% in the effect on the timing yield, while existing methods identified only about 10%.

Incremental statistical static timing analysis with gate timing yield emphasis

Incremental analysis is indispensible for efficient circuit optimization, as it analyzes the effect by the modified circuit part only instead of analyzing a whole circuit again from beginning. This paper presents a new incremental statistical static timing analysis (SSTA) method, called timing yield-based incremental analysis (TYIA). TYIA uses the probability that the gate timing slack is non-negative to prune the timing change propagation after a gate replacement. In the experimental results using ISCAS-85 benchmarks, TYIA showed 2~5 times better accuracy in timing yield analysis at comparable efficiency, when compared to the existing incremental SSTA methods.

Level Converting Flip-Flops for High-Speed and Low-Power Applications

This letter presents two high-performance level-convert-ing flip-flops (LCFF) for multi-VDD systems, indirect precharging flip-flop (IPFF) and multi-supply complementary pass-transistor flip-flop (MCPFF). Employing a simple precharging scheme, IPFF provides high operating speed. MCPFF, on the other hand, provides low power operations by implementing the edge-triggering function with complementary pass transistors. Performance comparison indicates that IPFF operates at the highest speed and MCPFF consumes the lowest power among the seven LCFFs under evaluation.