Time-domain minimum-distance detector and its application to low power coding scheme on chip interface

This paper describes a minimum-distance detector based on a time-domain technique. In this technique, Hamming-distance of data is translated to delay time, and the minimum distance one fastest data is selected using a time-domain winner-take-all circuit. We describe that this technique is possible to realize using simple logic circuits so that it can achieve small chip area and short delay time. We fabricated test chips for the detector, and demonstrated 21.6[ns] for detecting the minimum distance data from eight 16-bit data, using 1.2µm CMOS technology. We show a data encoding chip for low power chip interface as an application of the detector.