INTRODUCTION TO LOW-POWER VLSI DESIGN

Abstract

The paper is a survey of the current status of research and practices in various disciplines of low-power VLSI developments. After briefly discussing the rationale of the contemporary focus on low-power design, it presents the metrics and techniques used to assess the merits of the various solutions proposed for improved energy efficiency. The requirements to be fulfilled by process technologies and device structures are reviewed as well as several promising circuit design styles and ad hoc design techniques. The impact of the design automation tools is analyzed with a special emphasis on physical design and logic synthesis. A review of various architectural trade-offs, including power management, parallelism and pipelining, synchronous versus asynchronous architectures and dataflow transformations are covered, followed by a brief discussion of the impact of the system definition, software and algorithms to the overall power efficiency. Emerging semiconductor technologies and device structures are discussed and the paper is concluded with the trends and research topics for the future.