IEICE Transactions on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences
Online ISSN : 1745-1337
Print ISSN : 0916-8508
Special Section on VLSI Design and CAD Algorithms
Power Optimization of Sequential Circuits Using Switching Activity Based Clock Gating
Xin MANTakashi HORIYAMAShinji KIMURA
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2010 Volume E93.A Issue 12 Pages 2472-2480

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Abstract

Clock gating is the insertion of control signal for registers to switch off unnecessary clock signals selectively without violating the functional correctness of the original design so as to reduce the dynamic power consumption. Commercial EDA tools usually have a mechanism to generate clock gating logic based on the structural method where the control signals specified by designers are used, and the effectiveness of the clock gating depends on the specified control signals. In the research, we focus on the automatic clock gating logic generation and propose a method based on the candidate extraction and control signal selection. We formalize the control signal selection using linear formulae and devise an optimization method based on BDD. The method is effective for circuits with a lot of shared candidates by different registers. The method is applied to counter circuits to check the co-relation with power simulation results and a set of benchmark circuits. 19.1-71.9% power reduction has been found on counter circuitsafter layout and 2.3-18.0% cost reduction on benchmark circuits.

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© 2010 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers
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