Switched capacitor quasi-adiabatic clocks

Clock Distribution Networks (CDNs) in high speed designs can consume 30-50% of the total chip dynamic power. Adiabatic clock circuits can save some of this power, but these depend on a time varying power supply which is difficult to implement in practice. In this paper, we present the first quasi-adiabatic clock circuit with a constant supply voltage at high speeds. Our proposed adiabatic clocks attain an average 23% clock power savings with better slew rate and the same skew compared to traditional buffered clocks.