Adiabatic Logic has been developing energy recycling techniques which can be used to recover power used communicating between chips.

Shrinking transistor geometry means that circuits can operate at faster speeds and therefore the energy recycling techniques can be applied not only between chips on a printed circuit board but also for communications within a chip. This means that the market for energy recycling techniques grows as technology progresses.

The results lead to a portfolio of patented technology, including the Intelligent Output Driver and the Adiabatic Super Buffer.

Products

Intelligent Output Driver (IOD)

The Intelligent Output Driver (IOD) is a patented technology that uses the speed of submicron CMOS to actively mimic the voltage-current drive characteristics of a classic driver with a source (or series) terminator resistor.

It does this in such a way that the bulk of the current is delivered to the load capacitance non-resistively from a reservoir capacitance maintained at a mid-rail voltage, assisted by the inherent inductance of the load. The reservoir capacitance delivers charge on rising edges and recovers charge on falling edges thereby recycling energy, which conventionally is wasted.

The result is a power saving of up to 75% over conventional output pad drivers.

Adiabatic Super Buffer (ASB)

The Adiabatic Super Buffer (ASB) is fully on-chip technology which allows heavily loaded interconnects to be driven using only 50% of the power used by a conventional buffer.

For example, a typical conventional clock buffer uses a current at least equal to fCV2. Replacing a conventional clock buffer with the ASB reduces the power usage by a factor of two.

Significantly, the technology can reproduce very fast edges and yet significantly reduce switching noise generation on-chip.

ASB has fully static operation and can reproduce any input frequency or duty cycle, making it an effective solution to reduce power consumption of any heavily loaded signal with high activity factor.

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