A reduced-swing internal bus scheme is proposed for achieving ultralow-power LSI's. The proposed data-dependent logic swing bus (DDL bus) uses charge sharing between bus wires and an additional bus wire to reduce its voltage swing. With this technique, the power dissipation of the proposed bus is reduced to 1/16 that of a conventional bus when used for a 16-b-wide bus. In addition, a dual-reference sense-amplifying receiver (DRSA receiver) has been developed to convert a reduced-swing bus signal to a CMOS-level signal without loss of noise margin or speed. Experimental circuits fabricated using 0.5-µm CMOS process verify the low-power operation of the proposed bus at an operating frequency of 40 MHz with a supply voltage of 3.3 V.