Low-power single-edge triggered flip-flop, and time borrowing internally stitched flip-flop

Abstract

A new family of shared clock single-edge triggered flip-flops that reduces a number of internal clock devices from 8 to 6 devices to reduce clock power. The static pass-gate master-slave flip-flop has no performance penalty compared to the flip-flops with 8 clock devices thus enabling significant power reduction. The flip-flop intelligently maintains the same polarity between the master and slave stages which enables the sharing of the master tristate and slave state feedback clock devices without risk of charge sharing across all combinations of clock and data toggling. Because of this, the state of the flip-flop remains undisturbed, and is robust across charge sharing noise. A multi-bit time borrowing internal stitched flip-flop is also described, which enables internal stitching of scan in a high performance time-borrowing flip-flop without incurring increase in layout area.