Leakage power driven behavioral synthesis of pipelined datapaths

Abstract

We present a scheduling, allocation and binding methodology that employs MTCMOS as the standby leakage reduction mechanism. We use the simulated annealing meta-heuristic for optimizing leakage power The cost functions for our approach are obtained after extensive characterization trials taking into account, the run-time characteristics of the MTCMOS approach. Our approach makes use of two cost factors: leakage cost, for optimizing the number of MTCMOS instances, and settling cost, for the minimization of their active-to-standby transitions. We enhance throughput and performance of the datapaths by synthesizing them as functionally pipelined systems before performing our optimizations. Using fully pre-characterized leakage libraries for RT-level simulation, we obtain an average leakage power reduction of 36.2%, and an average area overhead of 6.2%. However, with a small increase in schedule latency, we obtain an average reduction of around 3.95%-4.6% in the total area.