Conditional-Boosting Flip-Flop for Near-Threshold Voltage Application

A conditional-boosting flip-flop is proposed for ultralow-voltage application where the supply voltage is scaled down to the near-threshold region. The proposed flip-flop adopts voltage boosting to provide low latency with reduced performance variability in the near-threshold voltage region. It also adopts conditional capture to minimize the switching power consumption by eliminating redundant boosting operations. Experimental results in a 65-nm CMOS process indicated that the proposed flip-flop provided up to 72% lower latency with 75% less performance variability due to process variation, and up to 67% improved energy-delay product at 25% switching activity compared with conventional precharged differential flip-flops.