Register Design for Adiabatic Circuits

In adiabatic switching [1], the registers as part of the circuitry, up to now have not been examined very well. Known approaches will be either only partially adiabatic [2], or integral part of the combinatorial logic, making automatic design hard [8, 5]. They are, however, a crucial part of the design. First, because in the registers information is stored, so here all the problems connected with reversible or irreversible logic have to be taken into account. Second, because the registers will have to shape the input signals for the combinatorial logic, which have to cope with some restrictions. In this paper, two different adiabatic registers will be introduced, which will be able to generate the two needed types of waveforms needed for a combinatorial part using switch logic. All internal nodes of the registers are charged and discharged adiabatically. Since the registers will be used in irreversible logic, diodes are used to erase the stored information with low power losses.