Clock-powered logic for a 50 MHz low-power RISC datapath

This low-power microprocessor datapath is based on energy recovery by which dissipation is reduced for power-critical lines while high performance is sustained. With the energy-recovery approach, the clocks directly drive the capacitive loads. The initial benefit is that the VLSI chips dissipate less heat. Employing an energy efficient resonant or stepwise (charge-recycling) clock driver results in a low-power system because circuit energy is recovered and reused rather than dissipated as heat. A 16b datapath based on this approach contains a 16-word, 3-port register file (RF), an arithmetic logic unit (ALU), a compare unit (CU), bypass logic, PLA-based control logic, a clock generator (CG) that produces resonant or conventional clock pulses, and 16 pad drivers.