An Adiabatic Architecture for Linear Signal Processing

Abstract. Using adiabatic CMOS logic instead of the more traditional static CMOS logic can lower the power consumption of a hardware design. However, the characteristic differences between adiabatic and static logic, such as a four-phase clock, have a far reaching influence on the design itself. These influences are investigated in this paper by adapting a systolic array of CORDIC devices to be implemented adiabatically.

We present a means to describe adiabatic logic in VHDL and use it to define the systolic array with precise timing and bit-true calculations. The large pipeline bubbles that occur in a naive version of this array are identified and removed to a large degree. As an example, we demonstrate a parameterization of the CORDIC array that carries out adaptive RLS filtering.