A technique for estimating power in asynchronous circuits

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the problem of estimating power consumption in an asynchronous (clock-less) circuit. Specifically, we examine the differences in power estimation in synchronous and asynchronous circuits and propose to integrate and extend the recent work by Devadas, Ghosh, and Keutzer to self-timed circuits. A Petri net based abstraction for self-timed circuits is used to derive algorithms for power estimation. The analysis is performed on the embedded discrete time Markov chain in the reachability graph of the Petri net.