3.3 V, novel circuit techniques for a 2.8-million-transistor BiCMOS RISC processor

3.3-V, high-speed circuit techniques, including a 0.6-ns single-ended common-base sense circuit, a 0.5-ns 22-b comparator circuit, and a 0.7-ns 3-input adder circuit, are applied to a 2.8-million-transistor RISC (reduced instruction set computer) microprocessor. The processor is implemented in a 0.5-/spl mu/m BiCMOS 3.3-V 4-metal-layer technology. The chip includes a 240-MFLOPS (million floating point operations per second) double-precision floating-point unit and a 24-kByte cache, and dissipates 17 W at 120 MHz.