A temperature-aware synthesis approach for simultaneous delay and leakage optimization

Abstract

Accurate thermal knowledge is essential for achieving ultra low power in deep sub-micron CMOS technology, as it affects gate speed linearly and leakage exponentially. We propose a temperature-aware synthesis technique that efficiently utilizes input vector control (IVC), dual-threshold voltage gate sizing (GS) and pin reordering (PR) for performing simultaneous delay and leakage power optimization. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to consider these techniques in a synergistic fashion with thermal knowledge. We evaluate our approach by showing improvements over each method when considered in isolation and in conjunction. We also study the impact of employing considered techniques with/without accurate thermal knowledge. We ran simulations on synthesized ISCAS-85 and ITC-99 circuits on a 45 nm cell library while conforming to an industrial design flow. Leakage power improvements of up to 4.54X (2.14X avg.) were achieved when applying thermal knowledge over equivalent methods that do not.