High-Speed, Low-Power Quasi Delay Insensitive Handshake Circuits Based on FinFET Technology

FinFET transistor is a promising alternative to CMOS transistor beyond 25nm technology. Independent-Gate FinFET (IGFinFET) are particularly interesting, as they have double gates and offer various options to designers. In the context of this technology, asynchronous circuits are being considered. Due to sizing and transistors shrinkage, synchronous circuits have encountered problems such as clock skew and clock tree distribution, whereas asynchronous circuits have addressed these problems by removing the global clock. Pre-Charged Half and Full Buffer (PCHB, PCFB) are asynchronous design template blocks to which high level descriptions are synthesized. In this paper, using different IGFinFET configurations, we reduce PCHB (PCFB) handshaking circuits area and power consumption by 21% and 19% (by 21% and 15%), respectively. In addition, by suitably biasing IGFinFET transistors, during the handshaking phase, we can enter evaluate and precharge phases earlier in PCHB (PCFB) circuits and thus increase throughput by 11% (9%) and decrease power consumption by 7% (5%) with no area overhead.