Low-Power Flip-Flops: Survey, Comparative Evaluation, and a New Design

Synchronous logic design is the dominant main stream integrated circuit design methodology. Flip-flops are an inherent building block in any synchronous design. Furthermore flip-flops constitute most of the load on the clock distribution and power networks, which are the main power consuming networks of a synchronous integrated circuit. We survey, design and simulate a superset of flip-flops designed for low power and high performance. We highlight the basic design features of these flip-flops and evaluate them based on timing characteristics, power consumption, and other metrics. Moreover, we propose a new flip-flop design. We go in depth into a finer granularity comparison of the lowest peak power surveyed flip-flops reported in the literature; we show the competitiveness of the new design and make our recommendations.