A design methodology for low power, reduced area, reliable CMOS buffers

Circuit speed, power dissipation, physical area, and system reliability are the four performance criteria of primary concern in tapered buffer design. Each places a separate, often conflicting constraint on the design of a tapered buffer. This paper presents a unified design methodology for CMOS tapered buffers which permits trade-offs to be easily made among these four performance criteria. The methodology utilizes analytical expressions for each of the performance criteria. A process dependent look-up table is constructed based on these expressions and is used in conjunction with application-specific performance constraints to efficiently determine the optimal implementation for each particular buffer instantiation.