A new multiple-valued current-mode (MVCM) integrated circuit using a switched current-source control technique is proposed for a 1.5 V-supply high-speed arithmetic circuit with low-power dissipation. The use of a differential logic circuit (DLC) with a pair of dual-rail inputs makes the input voltage swing small, which results in a high driving capability at a lower supply voltage, while having large static power dissipation. In the proposed DLC using a switched current control technique, the static power dissipation can be greatly reduced because current sources in non-active circuit blocks are turned off. Since the gate of each current source is directly controlled by using a multiphase clock whose technique has been already used in dynamic circuit design, no additional transistors are required for currentsource control. As a typical example of arithmetic circuits, a new 1.5 V-supply 5454-bit multiplier based on a 0.8µm standard CMOS technology is also designed. Its performance is about 1.3 times faster than that of a binary fastest multiplier under the normalized power dissipation. A prototype chip is also fabricated to confirm the basic operation of the proposed MVCM integrated circuit.

An adder-based arithmetic VLSI processor using the SD number system is proposed for the applications of real-time computation such as intelligent robot system. Especially in the intelligent robot control system, not only high throughput but also small latency is a very important subject to make quick response for the sensor feedback situation, because the next input sample is obtained only after the robot actually moves. It is essential in the VLSI architecture for the intelligent robot system to make the latency as small as possible. The use of parallelism is an effective approach to reduce the latency. To meet the requirement, an architecture of a new multiple-valued arithmetic VLSI processor is developed. In the processor, addition and subtraction are performed by using the single adderbased processing element (PE). More complex basic arithmetic operations such as multiplication and division are performed by the appropriate data communications between the adder-based PEs with preserving their parallelism. In the proposed architecture, fine-grain parallel processing at the adder-based PE level is realized, and all the PEs can be fully utilized for any parallel arithmetic operations according to adder-based data dependency graph. As a result, the processing speed will be greatly increased in comparison with the conventional parallel processors having the different kinds of the arithmetic PEs such as an adder, a multiplier and a divider. To realize the arithmetic VLSI processor using the adder-based PEs, we introduce the signed-digit (SD) number system for the parallel arithmetic operations because the SD arithmetic has the advantage of modularity as well as parallelism. The multiple-valued bidirectional currentmode technology is also used for the implementation of the compact and high-speed adder-based PE, and the reduction of the number of the interconnections. It is demonstrated that these advantges of the multiple-valued technology are fully used for the implementation of the arithmetic VLSI processor. As a result, the latency of the proposed multiple-valued processor is reduced to 25% that of the binary processor integrated in the same chip size.

It is well known that the multiple-valued signed-digit (SD) arithmetic circuits have the attractive features of compactness and high-speed operation. However, both of these features have yet to be utilized fully. In this paper, we consider the application of a parallel-structure-based VLSI processor. A high-performance parallel-structure-based multiple-valued VLSI processor using the radix-2 SD number system is proposed. Its compactness makes the parallelism high under chip size limitations in comparison with the ordinary binary arithmetic circuits. Moreover, the speed of the single arithmetic module is very high in the SD arithmetic circuits, so that we can take advantage of the high-speed operation in the parallel-structure-based VLSI processor chip. The multiple-valued bidirectional current-mode technology is used not only in high-speed small sized arithmetic circuits, but also in reducing the number of connections in the parallel-structure-based VLSI processor. The proposed processor is specially developed for real-time digital control, where the performance is evaluated by delay time. Performance estimation using SPICE simulators shows that the delay time of proposed processor for matrix operations such as matrix multiplication is greatly reduced in comparison with a conventional binary processor.