Synthesis of low-power selectively-clocked systems from high-level specification

ABSTRACT

We propose a technique for synthesizing low-power systems from behavioral specifications. We analyze the control flow of the specification model to detect mutually exclusive sections of the computation. A selectively-clocked interconnection of interacting FSMs is automatically generated and optimized, where each FSM controls the execution of one section of computation. Only one of the interacting FSMs is active for a high fraction of the operation time, while the others are idle and their clocks are stopped. Periodically, the active machine releases the control of the system to another FSM and stops. Our interacting FSM implementation achieves consistently lower power dissipation than the functionally equivalent monolithic implementation. On average, 37% power savings and 12% speedup are obtained, despite a 30% area overhead.

REFERENCES

• 1: BENINI, L. AND DE MICHELI, G. 1996. Transformation and synthesis of FSMs for low power gated clock implementation. IEEE Trans. Comput.-Aided Des. Integr. Circuits 15, 6 (June 1996), 630-643.
• 2: Alessandro Bogiolo , Luca Benini , Bruno Riccò, Power estimation of cell-based CMOS circuits, Proceedings of the 33rd annual conference on Design automation, p.433-438, June 03-07, 1996, Las Vegas, Nevada, United States [doi>10.1145/240518.240601]
• 3: Sue-Hong Chow , Yi-Cheng Ho , TingTing Hwang , C. L. Liu, Low power realization of finite state machines—a decomposition approach, ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES), v.1 n.3, p.315-340, July 1996 [doi>10.1145/234860.234862]
• 4: Giovanni De Micheli, Synthesis and Optimization of Digital Circuits, McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 1994
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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  B. Hardware
  B.1 CONTROL STRUCTURES AND MICROPROGRAMMING
      B.1.2 Control Structure Performance Analysis and Design Aids
          Subjects: Automatic synthesis**

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design

Keywords:
gated clock, high-level synthesis, low power