A novel synthesis approach for active leakage power reduction using dynamic supply gating

: Due to exponential increase in subthreshold leakage with technology scaling and temperature increase, leakage power is becoming a major fraction of total power in the active mode. We present a novel lowcost design methodology with associated synthesis flow for reducing both switching and active leakage power using dynamic supply gating. A logic synthesis approach based on Shannon expansion is proposed that dynamically applies supply gating to idle parts of general logic circuits even when they are performing useful computation. Experimental results on a set of MCNC benchmark circuits in a predictive 70nm process exhibits improvements of 15% to 88% in total active power compared to the results obtained by a conventional optimization flow. Categories & Subject Descriptors: B.7.1 [Integrated Circuits]: Types and Design Styles ? supply gating, logic synthesis General Terms: Algorithms, Design, Performance

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: DAC
• Authors: Swarup Bhunia, Nilanjan Banerjee, Qikai Chen, Hamid Mahmoodi-Meimand, Kaushik Roy
• Keywords: Active Leakage Power, DAC 2005, Design Automation, Dynamic Supply Gating, Supply Gating