Dynamic Power Optimizations

Abstract

Dynamic power is an important component of the power consumption of a hardware design. In this chapter, we present two algorithms that target the reduction of dynamic power during the CAOS-based synthesis process and produce RTL that can be synthesized into power-efficient hardware. We also present experimental results to show that when a CAOS specification is compiled using these algorithms, the resulting hardware (without any additional gate-level power optimizations) has power/area/latency numbers comparable to those obtained by using the well-known industrial-strength power optimization RTL to gate-level synthesis tools such as Magma Blast Power or Synopsys Power Compiler.