A concept of analog-digital merged circuit architecture for future VLSI's

Abstract

This paper describes the new analog-digital merged circuit architecture which utilizes the pulse modulation signals. By reconsidering the information representing and processing principles, and the circuit operations governed by the physical law, the new circuit architecture is proposed to overcome the limitations of existent VLSI technologies. The proposed architecture utilizes the pulse width modulation (PWM) signal which has analog information in the time domain, and be constructed with the novel PWM circuits which carry out the multi-input arithmetic operations, the signal conversions and the data storage. It has a potential to exploit the high speed switching capability of deep sub-μm devices, and to reduce the number of devices and the power dissipation to one-tenth of those of the binary digital circuits. Therefore it will effectively implement the intelligent processing systems utilizing 0.5–0.2 μm scaled CMOS devices.