The power consumption of a sequential circuit can be reduced by decomposing it into subcircuits which can be turned off when inactive. Power can also be reduced by careful state encoding. Modeling a given circuit as a finite-state machine, we formulate its decomposition into submachines as an integer linear programming (ILP) problem, and automatically generate the ILP model with power minimization as the objective. A simple, but powerful state encoding method is used for the submachines to further reduce power consumption. We present experimental results which show that circuits designed by our approach consume 30% to 90% less power than conventional circuits. Categories and Subject Descriptors: B.7 INTEGRATED CIRCUITS. Additional classification: F.1 ION BY ABSTRACT DEVICES. General Terms: Algorithms, design, experimentation. Keywords Finite-state machine, decomposition, low power, integer linear programming.
Feng Gao, John P. Hayes