Design and implementation of electrical-supply-free VLSI circuits

The authors propose an approach to the design and implementation of VLSI circuits free of electrical supply and power rails. With this approach, the circuits can be made to use the power carried by the incident light for supply, control and optical charge pumping. The proposed basic cell consists of an NMOS transistor and a photodiode connected between the drain of the transistor and the ground. The circuits can be fabricated in a standard CMOS technology without additional processing. A test circuit involving basic gates and a pulse generator has been designed and fabricated in a 0.18 μm process and successfully tested.