Kakutaro Suda

A 64-bit carry look ahead adder using pass transistor BiCMOS gates

This paper describes a 64-bit two-stage carry look ahead adder utilizing pass transistor BiCMOS gate. The new pass transistor BiCMOS gate has a smaller intrinsic delay time than conventional BiCMOS gates. Furthermore, this gate has a rail-to-rail output voltage. Therefore the next gate does not have a large degradation of its driving capability. The exclusive OR and NOR gate using the pass transistor BiCMOS gate shows a speed advantage over CMOS gates under a wide variance in load capacitance. The pass transistor BiCMOS gates were applied to full adders, carry path circuits, and carry select circuits. In consequence, a 64-bit two-stage carry look ahead adder was fabricated using a 0.5 /spl mu/m BiCMOS process with single polysilicon and double-metal interconnections. A critical path delay time of 3.5 ns was observed at a supply voltage of 3.3 V. This is 25% better than the result of the adder circuit using CMOS technology. Even at the supply voltage of 2.0 V, this adder is faster than the CMOS adder.

A 2-ns 16K bipolar ECL RAM with reduced word-line voltage swing

A reduced word-line voltage swing (RWS) circuit configuration that results in a high-speed bipolar ECL (emitter coupled logic) RAM is proposed. The write operation can be performed with the configuration in the condition of reduced word-line voltage swing, which causes write operation error in conventional circuit configurations. The proposed configuration cuts off the hold current of the selected memory cell, and then the low-voltage node is charged up through the load p-n-p transistor. A 16-kb ECL RAM with a p-n-p loaded memory cell was fabricated by advanced silicide-base transistor (ASBT) process technology. A 2-ns access time was obtained with 1.8-W power consumption in which the word-line voltage swing was reduced by 0.7 V from a conventional case. Simulation results show that the access time is improved by 25% compared with a conventional case. Simulation results also show that writing time becomes comparable with the conventional time of 1.7 ns when the load p-n-p transistor has a saturation current of 5.0* 10/sup 17/ A and a current gain of 1.0. The saturation current is 5 times larger and the current gain is 5 times smaller than those of the standard lateral p-n-p transistor. >