Gate equivalent

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. If higher output drive strength is required, an additional output driver stage of four transistors is added.

References

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

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Gate equivalent

See also

References