A Low Power Tunable Delay Element Suitable for Asynchronous Delays of Burst Information

A low-energy delay element based on a thyristor-like circuit is proposed that is suitable for concatenation in dense arrays in order to delay narrowly spaced burst timing information with accompanying data bits. Handshaking is built into the cell to ensure no information is lost. There is no static power dissipation aside from leakage and the energy consumption is not a function of the achieved delay. A design fabricated in a UMC 90 nm CMOS process has delays from 5 ns to 1 mus, as tuned through an analog input port, require an energy consumption of 50 fJ/delay event with a supply voltage of 1 V.