Low power methodology for an ASIC design flow based on high-level synthesis

Abstract

Power management in system-on-chip (SoC) design has become very important in modern nanometric technologies. It is desirable to consider power optimization at the system-level for maximum power savings due to its higher level of abstraction. Clock gating and power gating are two well-known techniques for dynamic and leakage power reduction respectively. They can even be integrated to get maximum power reduction by using the same signal to control both. This work presents a methodology using both these techniques to save power of an inverse discrete cosine transform (IDCT) design when the register transfer level (RTL) is generated automatically by high-level synthesis (HLS). Power gating is implemented by capturing the power intent using common power format (CPF). This work mainly highlights the prospects of integrating CPF with automatically generated RTL using HLS flow. Saving in dynamic power by a factor of around 10× is obtained through clock gating while more than 50% saving in static power is obtained through power gating. Power gating also results in some area overhead.