Power islands: A high-level synthesis technique for reducing spurious switching activity and leakage


DAL D., Kutagulla D., Nunez A., Mansouri N.

2005 IEEE International 48th Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems, MWSCAS 2005, Cincinnati, OH, Amerika Birleşik Devletleri, 7 - 10 Ağustos 2005, cilt.2005, ss.1875-1879 identifier

  • Yayın Türü: Bildiri / Tam Metin Bildiri
  • Cilt numarası: 2005
  • Doi Numarası: 10.1109/mwscas.2005.1594490
  • Basıldığı Şehir: Cincinnati, OH
  • Basıldığı Ülke: Amerika Birleşik Devletleri
  • Sayfa Sayıları: ss.1875-1879
  • Atatürk Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

This work introduces a novel High-Level Synthesis (HLS) methodology that eliminates the Spurious Switching Activity (SSA) and the leakage in a great portion of the resulting circuit through the use of power islands. A power island is a cluster of logic whose power can be controlled independent from the rest of the circuit, and hence can be completely powered down when all of the logic contained within it is idling. By powering down an island: (1) the spurious switching that results from the broadcast to idle components is silenced and (2) the power consumption due to leakage in inactive components is eliminated. Our experiments conducted on several synthesis benchmarks using a transistor-level simulator showed an average reduction of 11% in total power consumption due to the power islands without introducing any overhead. We can project that in future technologies, when leakage becomes a more dominant component of the overall power, significantly more savings can be gained from design with power islands. © 2005 IEEE.