Reducing pipeline energy demands with local DVS and dynamic retiming

The quadratic relationship between voltage and energy has made dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) one of the most powerful techniques to reduce system power demands. Recently, techniques such as Razor DVS, voltage overscaling, and Intelligent Energy Management have emerged as approaches to further reduce voltage by eliminating costly voltage margins inserted into traditional designs to ensure alwayscorrect operation. The degree to which a global voltage controller can shave voltage margins is limited by imbalances in pipeline stage latency. Since all pipeline stages share the same voltage, the stage exercising the longest critical path will define the overall voltage of the system, even if other stages could potentially run at lower voltages. In this paper, we evaluate two local tuning mechanisms in the context of Razor DVS, a local voltage controller scheme that allows each pipeline stages it's own voltage level, and a lower cost dynamic retiming scheme that incorporates per-stage cl...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: ISLPED
• Authors: Seokwoo Lee, Shidhartha Das, Toan Pham, Todd M. Austin, David Blaauw, Trevor N. Mudge
• Keywords: ISLPED 2004, Pipeline Stage, Voltage, Voltage Margins