A Novel Flow for Reducing Dynamic Power and Conditional Performance Improvement

Abstract

Dynamic power is a major source of power dissipation for high speed designs. Domain isolation methodology is a recently-proposed technique for reducing dynamic power based on controlling the evaluation phase of dynamic logic (toggling control). This work demonstrates some design issues in the domain isolation methodology and explains why it is inefficient with pipelined systems. We propose fixes for its identified issues, which enables using the toggling control with pipelined systems in a more efficient way. A novel flow named “Power Reduction Flow” is proposed for reducing dynamic power of digital circuits. Our flow uses novel design analytical methods, novel “Dynamic Logic Modifier Flow”, and novel “Dynmic Logic Area Validation Flow” for reducing dynamic power with conditionally improving performance. The new design analytical methods are based on probability theory, SystemVerilog covergroups, and digital circuit modeling. A new event type perspective is also proposed to analyze designs to reduce dynamic power in them. Experimental results using TSMC 65 nm and low supply voltages show up to 59% power reduction compared to the original traditional techniques with improving circuit’s performance by $3\\times $ of its original maximum operating frequency at the cost of an extra 12.3% increase in area.