Asynchronous burst-mode control for low-power gated-clock finite state machines

Abstract

Design of contemporary digital circuits has great need of power reduction. The reasons are owing to portable applications and CMOS Deep-Sub-Micron technology. Finite state machines (FSM) play an important role in these circuits. The partitioning of an FSM into several sub-FSMs is a technique widely used in the reduction of energy consumption. An interesting style for activating and deactivating sub-FSMs is the asynchronous communication proposed by Oelmann. In this paper we propose a high performance control to the asynchronous communication between sub-FSMs. Compared with Oelmann's control, our control consumes less power, occupies less area and has a smaller cycle time.