Design and implementation of cost-effective probabilistic-based noise-tolerant VLSI circuits

As the size of CMOS devices is scaled down to nanometers, noise can significantly affect circuit performance. Because noise is random and dynamic in nature, a probabilistic-based approach is better suited to handle these types of errors compared with conventional CMOS designs. In this paper, we propose a cost-effective probabilistic-based noise-tolerant circuit-design methodology. Our cost-effective method is based on master-and-slave Markov random field (MRF) mapping and master-and-slave MRF logic-gate construction. The resulting probabilistic-based MRF circuit trades hardware cost for circuit reliability. To demonstrate a noise-tolerant performance, an 8-bit MRF carry-lookahead adder (MRF-CLA) was implemented using the 0.13-μm CMOS process technology. The chip measurement results show that the proposed master-and-slave MRF-CLA can provide a 7.00× 10^-5 bit-error rate (BER) under 10.6-dB signal-to-noise ratio, while the conventional CMOS-CLA can only provide 8.84×10^-3 BER. Because of high noise immunity, the master-and-slave MRF-CLA can operate under 0.25 V to tolerate noise interference with only 1.9 μW of energy consumption. Moreover, the transistor count can be reduced by 42% as compared with the direct-mapping MRF-CLA design.