Gate equivalent - Misplaced Pages

Measure of circuit complexity

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A gate equivalent (GE) stands for a unit of measure which allows specifying manufacturing-technology-independent complexity of digital electronic circuits. For today's CMOS technologies, the silicon area of a two-input drive-strength-one NAND gate usually constitutes the technology-dependent unit area commonly referred to as gate equivalent. A specification in gate equivalents for a certain circuit reflects a complexity measure, from which a corresponding silicon area can be deduced for a dedicated manufacturing technology.

In digital circuit design, a dedicated standard cell library is employed for each manufacturing technology (e.g., CMOS). The standard cell library comprises many different logic gates, for example a NAND gate. For each logical type of logic gate, e.g., a two-input NAND, there usually exist different physical realizations in the standard cell library, for instance with different output drive strengths.

Basically, a two-input drive-strength-one NAND gate in CMOS technology consists of four transistors.

References

Digital Integrated Circuit Design: From VLSI Architectures to CMOS Fabrication, Hubert Kaeslin, Cambridge University Press, 2008

v t e Digital electronics
Components	Transistor Resistor Inductor Capacitor Printed electronics Printed circuit board Electronic circuit Flip-flop Memory cell Combinational logic Sequential logic Logic gate Boolean circuit Integrated circuit (IC) Hybrid integrated circuit (HIC) Mixed-signal integrated circuit Three-dimensional integrated circuit (3D IC) Emitter-coupled logic (ECL) Erasable programmable logic device (EPLD) Macrocell array Programmable logic array (PLA) Programmable logic device (PLD) Programmable Array Logic (PAL) Generic Array Logic (GAL) Complex programmable logic device (CPLD) Field-programmable gate array (FPGA) Field-programmable object array (FPOA) Application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) Tensor Processing Unit (TPU)
Theory	Digital signal Boolean algebra Logic synthesis Logic in computer science Computer architecture Digital signal Digital signal processing Circuit minimization Switching circuit theory Gate equivalent
Design	Logic synthesis Place and route Placement Routing Transaction-level modeling Register-transfer level Hardware description language High-level synthesis Formal equivalence checking Synchronous logic Asynchronous logic Finite-state machine Hierarchical state machine
Applications	Computer hardware Hardware acceleration Digital audio radio Digital photography Digital telephone Digital video cinematography television Electronic literature
Design issues	Metastability Runt pulse

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