Area- and Energy-Efficient Ternary D Flip-Flop Design

In this study, we propose a ternary D flip-flop using tristate ternary inverters for an energy-efficient ternary circuit design of sequential logic. The tristate ternary inverter is designed by adding the functionality of the transmission gate to a standard ternary inverter without an additional transistor. The proposed flip-flop uses 18.18% fewer transistors than conventional flip-flops do. To verify the advancement of the proposed circuit, we conducted an HSPICE simulation with CMOS 28 nm technology and 0.9 V supply voltage. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed flip-flop is better than the conventional flip-flop in terms of energy efficiency. The power consumption and worst delay are improved by 11.34% and 28.22%, respectively. The power-delay product improved by 36.35%. The above simulation results show that the proposed design can expand the Pareto frontier of a ternary flip-flop in terms of energy consumption. We expect that the proposed ternary flip-flop will contribute to the development of energy-efficient sensor systems, such as ternary successive approximation register analog-to-digital converters.