Flattop: The First Fully Adiabatic Computer

We recently completed the design of a fully-adibatic computer chip implementing the Billiard Ball Model of computation. This will be the first fully-adibatic chip that can be programmed to perform arbitrary computations (when tiled in sufficiently large arrays).

Slides for UMC '98 presentation, Jan. 8, 1998.

Paper to be presented at UMC '98.

The reversible and ``adiabatic'' transfer of charge in digital circuits has recently been a subject of interest in the low-power electronics community, but no one has yet created a complete, purely reversible CPU using this technology. Fundamental physical scaling laws imply that a fully-reversible processing element would permit unboundedly greater efficiency at some tasks, by several different metrics, than can be achieved with any possible irreversible computer. In this paper we describe the design of Flattop, a simple fully-adiabatic chip, now in fabrication, which can serve as a general-purpose parallel processor when tiled in large arrays. Flattop implements the Billiard Ball Cellular Automaton, a univeral and reversible model of computation. Flattop is implemented in a standard silicon 0.5 µm CMOS process using the Split-Level Charge Recovery Logic (SCRL) circuit family developed at our lab. Calculations indicate that our circuit can operate with about 2000 times the energy efficiency of an equivalent chip based on standard circuit techniques. Although Flattop is itself not a very practical architecture for performing arbitrary computations, it is an important proof-of-concept, demonstrating that universal reversible computers can actually be built using current technology.

Fall '96 6.374 project report, from an earlier stage of Flattop's design

Slides from 6.374 project presentation

In IslandDraw format. Pages 1, 2, 3, 4

An early cell layout in Postscript.

Warning: The version of the circuit in this layout actually is buggy and doesn't work. Exercise for the reader: find the bug(s).

Up to Mike's Reversible Computing Page


Last modified: Fri Dec 19 21:56:09 EST