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net ISSN (ONLINE): 2250-0758, ISSN (PRINT): 2394-6962

Volume-6, Issue-1, January-February-2016

International Journal of Engineering and Management Research
Page Number: 577-581

Embedded Logic Flip-Flops: A Conceptual Review

Sudhanshu Janwadkar1, Dr. Mahesh T Kolte2
1
ME Student, VLSI & Embedded Systems, Department of E&TC, MITCOE, Pune, INDIA
2
Department of E&TC, MITCOE, Pune, INDIA

ABSTRACT us assume that in some particular state-of-the-art high-

With advancement in CMOS technology, a lot of
research has been done to develop various logic styles to
improve the performance of logic circuits. D flip-flops (DFF)
are fundamental building blocks in almost every sequential
logic circuit. Hence, in sequential logic circuits, the overall
performance of the circuit is affected by the performance of
constituent DFFs.
In recent years, the focus has been towards
incorporating higher clock rates in a processor for better
performance. To achieve high clock rates, fine granularity
pipelining techniques are used, which implies that there are
relatively a fewer levels of logic in each pipeline stage. A
major consequence of this design trend is that the pipeline
overhead has becoming more significant. The primary cause
of pipeline overhead is the latency of the flip-flop or latch used
to design the processor and the clock skew of the system. This
calls out for the need of incorporating the logic functionality
within the architecture of flip-flop. The new family of flip-
flops are called Embedded Logic Flip Flops. In this Paper, we
have reviewed various Flip-flop architectures which have been
proposed so far. Our attempt is to do a qualitative analysis
and comparison of the proposed Embedded logic flip-flop
designs.
Keywords---- Embedded Logic, Latency, Edge-Triggered
Flip-flop, Power dissipation
I. INTRODUCTION
There has been a fundamental & gradual shift in
CMOS design technology with the level of integration
increasing from few thousands of transistors per chip (LSI)
to billions of transistors on single chip(VLSI). The
frequency of operation has also increased dramatically
from Megahertz (MHz) to Gigahertz (GHz). This
improvement in technology and speed has called out the
need for evaluating the performance of the design in terms
of chip area, delay and power dissipation.
In synchronous logic circuits, high speed is
achieved using pipeline architectures. In deep-pipelined
architectures, for an improved speed-up factor, a lower
pipeline overhead is desirable. The pipeline overhead is a
outcome of the latency associated with the pipeline
elements, such as latches and flip-flops. For example, Let
speed processor, the clock cycle is 20 gate delays. Let the
latency of the flip-flops used to store result intermediately
is three gate delays. Then, this would imply that the flip-
flop overhead amounts to 15% of the total cycle time. This
flip-flop latency ultimately degrades the overall
performance of the system, since no useful logic operation
is performed on the data when it is being latched. Another
important consequence of the above trend is that the
number of flip-flops used in the system has increased
exponentially from a few thousand flip-flops in early
designs to several tens of thousands of flip-flops in recent
designs [10].These facts clearly mark-out the importance of
marginalizing the delay associated with Flip-flop in the
design.
There have been many methods proposed to
eliminate the drawback of power consumption and latency.
The current trend towards this direction has been to
incorporate the logic functionality into the flip-flop. This
new family of flip-flops are called Embedded Logic Flip-
flops. The concept of Embedded logic flip-flop is shown in
Fig. 1. Embedded Logic Flip-Flop(ELFF) are simple high
speed low-power flip-flop implementations compared to
the discrete combinations of static logic and a flip-flop in
the design.[11] The merging of the logic function into the
architecture of the D FLip-flop would mean that we can
eliminate one or more levels of logic from the path leading
to the flip-flop. Also, logic operations can be performed on
the data during the times it is stored idly in the Flip-flop
memory.
Fig 1: Concept of Embedded Logic Flip-flop

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In this Review Paper, we have compared the pros

and cons of various Embedded Logic Flip Flop
architectures that have been proposed in past for Embedded
Logic Flip-flops.

II. LITERATURE SURVEY

Various techniques have been proposed in past to
optimize the chip area and delay time of sequential logic
circuits. However, we would be concentrating on the
designs and architectures which have focused on merging
the Logic function into Flip-flops as the primary technique.
Gerosa et al.’s (1994) have proposed PowerPC
603 master-slave latch [1]. The PowerPC 603 Master slave
latch was a static design. The architecture is shown in Fig
2. An obvious disadvantage of PowerPC 603 Master Slave
is that, being a static design, it suffered from increased
positive setup time. Despite all these shortcomings, the
design offers a good low power solution when the speed is
not a primary concern.
Fig 3: Edge-Triggered Semi-dynamic Flip flop (Klass
1998)
The primary requirements of a flip-flop in high-
speed digital design are short latency and a simple & robust
clocking scheme. Although, the design by Klass(1998)
provided for short-latency, no considerations were done
towards clocking scheme. Ashutos Das et al. (1999)
proposed various Single-phase pulsed flip-flop with an aim
of reducing the pipeline overhead. One such architecture is
shown in Fig 4. This family of flip-flop uses true single-
phase clocking (TSPC). These TSPC latches can be
combined in various different ways to implement edge-
triggered flip-flops. While their single clock phase is
advantageous, a drawback of single-phase pulsed flip-flops
is large latency[3].

Fig 2: PowerPC 603 master-slave latch (Gerosa et al.’s

1994 )

Klass(1998) proposes Edge Triggered Semi-

dynamic Flip-flop. The architecture of which is shown in
Fig 3. The circuit was composed of a dynamic front-end
Fig 4: Single Phase Pulsed Flip-flop (Ashutos Das et al.
and a static backend. Hence it was named semi-dynamic.
1999)
This family of flip-flops result in shorter latency,
reduced clock load and is a good interface between static
The next work in this regard was towards
and dynamic logic. Moreover, they eliminate one gate
incorporating logic functions into the latches. Ashutosh Das
delay from the critical path. The architecture uses a NAND
et al.(1999) propose SDFF(Semi-Dynamic Dlip-Flop) to
gate which allows the shutoff of the pull-down path to be
which complex logic functions can be added easily. In this
conditioned to the state of input D. This feature allows the
SDFF approach, most of the logic functions particularly
reduction of the sampling window by about one inverter
suitable for domino logic , such as wide OR functions,
delay[2].
multiplexers, and complex gates, can be implemented
In later developments, G. Lauterbach has used this
easily. In this design, For an N-input function, N transistors
architecture in design of Ultra-Sparc III microprocessor
are needed. This approach would eliminate one or more
architecture. He reports that the design is capable of
levels of logic from the path leading to the flip-flop. But,
incorporating logic functions with minimum delay penalty.
this would be at the cost of increased latency of the
This makes them very attractive for high-performance
design[3]. In Fig 5, A SDFF with embedded logic function
microprocessor design.[3]
Y= (A+B) (C+D) (E+F) (G+H) is shown.

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Fig. 5: Embedded Logic SDFF (Ashutos Das et al. 1999)
Redundant data transitions as well as large pre-
charge capacitance account for the major source of power
dissipation in the conventional Semi-dynamic Flip-flop
designs. Bai-Sun Kong et al. (2001) propose Conditional
Capture Flip Flops. The design is shown in Fig. 6. CCFF is
a complete family of low-power flip-flops which achieve
reduction in power dissipation by eliminating redundant
transitions of the internal nodes. These flip-flops have a
negative setup time. This results in smaller data-to-
output(D-Q) latency and it overcomes clock skew-related
cycle time loss. Bai-Sun Kong et al. (2001) report that
CCFF can achieve power dissipation of around 67%, as
compared to the conventional flip-flops[4].
Fig. 6: Conditional Capture Flip Flops (Bai-Sun Kong et al.
2001)
However, the disadvantage of CCFF is the
increased hold time requirement and D-Q delay (Data to
Output Delay) of the flip-flop. This can be accounted on
the presence of conditional structures in the critical path .
Also, the additional transistors added to implement the
conditional circuitry make the flip-flop design bulky and
hence result in an increase in power dissipation at higher
data activities.
Further, Nikola Nedovik et al. (2002) propose
Dual rail Dynamic Flip-Flop. The design is shown in Fig.
7. Similar to SDFF, the dual-rail DFF can also incorporate
logic functions. Due to the complementary nature of the
circuit, 2N transistors are needed to implement a function
with N inputs. However, Nikola Nedovik et al. (2002) also
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propose that the transistor count can be reduced by sharing
the transistors[5].
Fig. 7: Dual rail Dynamic Flip-flop (N. Nedovik et al.
2002)
The obvious disadvantage of this design is that, in
cases where the embedded logic is too complex, there is a
risk that the charge stored in intermediate nodes of the logic
may affect the dynamic nodes after the other has been
evaluated. This concept is called back charge sharing. A
possible reason for back charge sharing is that one of the
complementary paths in the flip-flop is always left open.
Peiyi Zhao et al. (2004) propose Conditional
Discharge Flip-Flop. In this technique, the switching
activity (as in case of CCFF) is eliminated. In this design,
when the input is high, the discharge path is disconnected.
This can be viewed as a Conditional Discharge technique;
hence the flip-flop being called Conditional Discharge Flip-
Flop. Peiyi Zhao et al. (2004) report that; the CDFF can
save up to 39% of the energy with the same speed as that
for the fastest pulsed flip-flops[5].
During our Literature Survey we found that not
much Research Work was done towards developing new
architectures during the years 2005-2010. However, minor
changes were done in existing designs to improve
performance. Rasouli (2005) propose single and Double
edge triggered Semi-dynamic Flip-flops for high speed
Applications. In this design, The increase in the speed has
been achieved by lowering the number of the stack
transistors in the discharge path[6]. Chen Kong Teh et al.
(2006) have added feature of Conditional Data Mapping to
CDFF for designing Low-Power and performance systems.
They have also compared various state of art designs for
50% PDP in their Research Work[7].
O. Sarbishei et al. (2007) states that Clock overlap
is an important issue in the design of sequential circuits.
They propose D flip-flop which benefits from the overlap
period of the clock signal. The work is based on 0.18m
CMOS technology. In order to evaluate the performance of
the proposed DFFs, a 16-bit shift register and a 3-bit
pipeline adder have been designed using the DFFs by the
researchers. They report a D-Q delay of 142 ps and Power
consumption of 360.4 W [8].
O. Sarbishei et al. (2010) present several efficient
architectures of dynamic/static edge-triggered flip–flops
with a compact embedded logic. These structures benefit
from the overlap period and fix most of the drawbacks of
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the dynamic logic family. This architecture has embedded a
pull-down network (PDN) into the overlap-based DFF. The
pull-down network can be any embedded Logic function
such as LUT, Multiplexer, inverter etc. If the PDN is
replaced by a single nMOS transistor, the design operates
as a single DFF. Further, O. Sarbishei et al. (2010) have
constructed a 4-bit Shift Regsiter based on the design of
flip-flop and compared their work with earlier existing
state-of-art design[9].
The major advantage of the SDFF has been the
capability to incorporate complex logic functions
efficiently. Although SDFF has the potential of offering
improved efficiency in terms of speed and area, but it does
not consider the power consumption criterion. As discussed
earlier, an efficient logic structure incorporating logic
functions must consider all three viz. speed, area and power
into account. In subsequent years, attempts are being made
to design a flip-flop, which can incorporate logic efficiently
in terms of all three; power, speed and area.
Kalarikkal Absel et al. (2013) propose a Low-
Power solution, Dual Dynamic Node Pulsed Flip-Flop with
efficient embedded logic. The design is shown in Figure 9.
This design incorporates a PDN driven by the data-input
instead of a transistor doing similar job. Due to this, charge
sharing issue is also addressed to a great extent which
otherwise becomes a serious issue when large logic is
embedded in the design[10].
Fig 9: Low-Power Dual Dynamic Node Pulsed Hybrid
Flip-Flop (Absel et al. 2013)
III. APPLICATIONS OF EMBEDDED
LOGIC FLIP FLOPS
1. In complex DSP processors, pipeline latencies are
a major issue. The partial result of a complex
operation is stored in memory temporarily till the
entire operation is completed. The result of this
complex operation might be used by a simple
operation. Incorporating the simple logic
functionality into the memory would reduce the
total delay.
2. These flip-flop architectures can be used for
design of shift-register, memory, LFSR etc.
Perofrmance improvement in terms of Power,
Area and Delay is an advantage.
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3. In chip Design, scan circuitry can be added to the
basic flip-flop design with nearly zero hit in
performance
IV. CONCLUSION
In this Review Paper, we have studied various
Flip-flop architectures with embedded logic in the design.
We have attempted to identify the advantage and
disadvantage of each design. The static designs offer a
good alternative when speed is not a concern. Semi-
dynamic & Dynamic Flip flop architectures such SDFF,
DDFF, DRFF etc can incorporate logic structures
efficiently into the designs but they yield poor performance
in terms of power dissipation. Conditional
Charging/discharging Flip-flop are efficient when it comes
to delay and power consideration. However, their
performance degrades if large logic structures are
embedded into the design. So far, The Dual Dynamic Node
Hybrid Flip-flop designs seem to offer the best
performance when all the three performance parameters i.e
area(or, number of transistors), power dissipation and
speed(ie delay considerations) are considered.
We conclude that there is still a lot of scope for
research work to be done towards developing more
efficient flip-flop designs incorporating logic functions.
Design of memories and processors using such Embedded-
Logic flip flops would optimize the on-chip area, delay &
power consumption and hence improve the overall
performance of the sequential circuits.
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