Abstract—Silicon area, performance, and testability have been, so far, the major design constraints to be met during the development of digital very-large-scale-integration (VLSI) systems. In recent years, however, things have changed; increasingly, power has been given weight comparable to the other design parameters. This is primarily due to the remarkable success of personal computing devices and wireless communication systems, which demand high-speed computations with low power consumption. In addition, there exists a strong pressure for manufacturers of high-end products to keep power under control, due to the increased costs of packaging and cooling this type of devices. Last, the need of ensuring high circuit reliability has turned out to be more stringent. The availability of tools for the automatic design of low-power VLSI systems has thus become necessary. More specifically, following a natural trend, the interests of the researchers have lately shifted to the investigation of power modeling, estimation, synthesis, and optimization techniques that account for power dissipation during the early stages of the design flow. This paper surveys representative contributions to this area that have appeared in the recent literature. Index Terms — Behavioral and logic synthesis, low power design, power management. I.

The need to reduce the power consumption of the next generation of digital systems is clearly recognized at all levels of system design. At the system level, power management is a very powerful technique and delivers large and unambiguous savings. The ideas behind power management can be extended to the logic level. This would involve determining, which parts of a circuit are computing results that will be used, and which are not. The sections that are not needed are then "shut off". This paper describes an approach termed guarded evaluation, which is an implementation of this idea. A theoretical framework and the algorithms that form the basis of the approach are presented. The underlying idea is to automatically determine the parts of the circuit that can be disabled on a per clock cycle basis. This saves the power used in all the useless transitions in those parts of the circuit. Initial experiments indicate substantial power savings and the strong potential of this approach for a l...

In recent years, power consumption has become a critical design concern for many VLSI systems. Nowhere is this more true than for portable, battery-operated applications, where power consumption has perhaps superceded speed and area as the overriding implementation constraint. This adds another degree of freedom - and complexity - to the design process and mandates the need for design techniques and CAD tools that address power, as well as area and speed. This thesis presents a methodology and a set of tools that support low-power system design. Low-power techniques at levels ranging from technology to architecture are presented and their relative merits are compared. Several case studies demonstrate that architecture and system-level optimizations offer the greatest opportunities for power reduction. A survey of existing power analysis tools, however, reveals a marked lack of powerconscious tools at these levels. Addressing this issue, a collection of techniques for modeling power at the register-transfer (RT) level of abstraction is described. These techniques model the impact of design complexity and signal activity on datapath, memory, control, and interconnect power consumption. Several VLSI design examples are used to verify the proposed tools, which exhibit near switch-level accuracy at RTlevel speeds. Finally, an integrated design space exploration environment is described that spans several levels of abstraction and embodies many of the power optimization and analysis strategies presented in this thesis.

Reducing the power dissipation of parallel multipliers is important in the design of digital signal processing systems. In many of these systems, the products of parallel multipliers are rounded to avoid growth in word size. The power dissipation and area of rounded parallel multipliers can be significantly reduced by a technique known as truncated multiplication. With this technique, the least significant columns of the multiplication matrix are not used. Instead, the carries generated by these columns are estimated. This estimate is added with the most significant columns to produce the rounded product. This paper presents the design and implementation of parallel truncated multipliers. Simulations indicate that truncated parallel multipliers dissipate between 29 and 40 percent less power than standard parallel multipliers for operand sizes of 16 and 32 bits. 1: Introduction High-speed parallel multipliers are fundamental building blocks in digital signal processing systems [1]. In...

One of the goals of 18-760 is that you acquire enough about the “fundamental ” ideas of CAD algorithms to be able to read new papers and see where they borrow from known techniques, and where they innovate. Even just this far through this class, you (should) now know a lot about basic Boolean representation, manipulation, verification, etc. The intent here is for you to write a short review (not to exceed 4 typed 8.5 X 11 pages, in a reasonable font, including any figures and tables) analyzing the attached paper: