A novel synthesis approach for active leakage power reduction using dynamic supply gating

Abstract

Due to exponential increase in subthreshold leakage with technology scaling and temperature increase, leakage power is becoming a major fraction of total power in the active mode. We present a novel low-cost design methodology with associated synthesis flow for reducing both switching and active leakage power using dynamic supply gating. A logic synthesis approach based on Shannon expansion is proposed that dynamically applies supply gating to idle parts of general logic circuits even when they are performing useful computation. Experimental results on a set of MCNC benchmark circuits in a predictive 70nm process exhibits improvements of 15% to 88% in total active power compared to the results obtained by a conventional optimization flow.