A leakage-tolerant multi-phase keeper for wide domino circuits

Abstract

The usefulness and the performance of high fan-in domino gates, having transistor stacks with few transistors, are seriously affected by the increasing subthreshold leakage current. In this paper we present a novel static keeper, which has variable driving strength in the evaluation phase. The keeper has a low gain during the output transition and, conditionally, a high gain during the rest of the evaluation phase. Hence, a larger amount of leakage and noise can be tolerated at no expense in delay.