Transforming control-flow intensive designs to facilitate power management

Abstract

We present techniques to transform scheduled descriptions of control-flow intensive (CFI) designs to facilitate power management. We investigate the factors that inhibit the application of power management in synthesized register-transfer level (RTL) implementations. Based on these insights, we present transformation techniques based on the concepts of variable protection, variable renaming and re-assignment, and limited controller state memory insertion that result in inherently power-managed architectures. Our transformation techniques can be easily used in conjunction with any existing resource sharing algorithm or in the framework of existing high-level synthesis tools. Experimental results on CFI designs indicate reductions of up to 76.6% (35.6% on average) in power consumption at area overheads not exceeding 10.1% (1.1% on average) over already power-optimized designs.