Evaluation of charge recovery circuits and adiabatic switching for low power CMOS design

A technique called charge recovery or adiabatic switching has been proposed to trade speed for energy consumption in CMOS circuits. We compare the speed/power of charge recovery to standard CMOS logic operating at different supply voltages and demonstrate that the overhead of charge recovery limits the overall power savings. In almost all cases, voltage scaled CMOS dissipates less power for the same level of performance.