Basic combinational gates, including NAND, NOR and XOR, are fundamental building blocks in CMOS digital circuits. This paper analyses and compares the power consumption due to transistor leakage of low-order and high-order basic logic gates. The NAND and NOR gates have been designed using different design styles and circuit topologies, including complementary CMOS, partitioned logic and complementary pass-transistor logic. The XOR gate has been designed using a variety of additional circuit topologies, including double pass-transistor logic, differential cascade voltage switch logic and a gate designed specifically for low power. The investigation has been carried out with HSPICE using the Berkeley Predictive Technology Models (BTPM) for three deep submicron technologies (0.07 m, 0.1 m and 0.13 m).
Geoff V. Merrett, Bashir M. Al-Hashimi