Abstract

Power reductions in VLSI systems have become a critical metric for design evaluation. Although power reduction techniques can be applied at every level of design abstraction, most automated power reduction techniques apply to the lower levels of design abstraction. Previous works have shown that sizable power reductions can be achieved by shutting down a system's sub-circuits when they are not needed. However, these shutdown techniques focus on shutting down only portions of the controller or the datapath of a single custom hardware processor. We therefore investigated the power reduction attainable by the evolving automated technique of functional partitioning, in which a process is automatically divided into multiple simpler, mutually exclusive, communicating processors, and then shut down the inactive processors. By shutting down the entire inactive processor, we have in effect shut down both the controller and datapath. Power reduction is accomplished because only one smaller proce...

Citations