Standard Cell and Supergates Designs: An Electrical Comparison on 4-Input Logic Functions

This paper presents an electrical study on logic functions with up to 4 inputs designed with a standard cell mapping and two automatically generated supergates methodologies. The results indicate that supergate-based designs reduce the average power in 84.4% of the studied cases while reducing area by 12.9%. Despite the supergate design increasing in average the circuit critical delay by 5.8%, it achieves better power-delay-product in 2823 (70.9%) of the 3982 studied logic functions. The reduction of logic levels is the main factor for gains obtained with supergates due to the glitch power reduction.