Low-power low-voltage 4-2 compressors for VLSI applications

This paper presents new 4-2 compressor architectures, a full-swing bipolar double pass-transistor 4-2 compressor, a new full-swing BiNMOS 4-2 compressor, a reduced-swing bipolar double pass-transistor 4-2 compressor and a reduced-swing double pass-transistor BiNMOS 4-2 compressor, that outperform a standard CMOS 4-2 compressor up to 3 times in power-efficiency at supply voltages 1.5 V-3 V. The bipolar double pass-transistor 4-2 compressor is more power-efficient than a standard CMOS 4-2 compressor even at a fanout of 1. All remaining proposed 4-2 compressors have a lower crossover capacitance with a standard CMOS 4-2 compressor than previously reported low-power 4-2 compressors. Circuits were designed and fabricated in 0.8 /spl mu/m BiCMOS technology.