Polynomial-Time Algorithms for Designing Dual-Voltage Energy Efficient Circuits

Energy consumption of digital circuits has become a primary constraint in electronic design. The increasing popularity of the portable devices like smart phone, ipad, tablet and notebook has created an overwhelming demand for extended battery life of these devices. Numerous methods for energy reduction in CMOS circuits have been proposed in the literature. Power reduction techniques at various levels of abstraction are used in modern digital designs. Most popular techniques used include power gating, clock gating, multiple-supply voltages, multiple threshold devices. In this work we propose a technique to use dual supply voltages in digital designs in order to get a reduction in energy consumption. Three new algorithms are proposed for finding and assigning low voltage in dual voltage designs. Given a circuit and a supply voltage, the first algorithm finds a suitable value for a lower supply voltage and the other two algorithms assign that lower voltage to individual gates. A linear time algorithm described in the literature is used for computing slacks for all gates in a circuit for a given supply voltage. The slack of a gate is the difference between the critical path delay and the delay of the longest path though that gate. A positive slack for a gate implies that the timing constraints are met, thus making a negative slack undesirable. An optimal lower supply voltage that maximizes the dynamic power savings is first found. For the computed gate slacks and the lower supply voltage, the gates in the circuit are divided into three groups. No gate in the first group can be assigned the lower supply without violating the positive slack condition. All gates in the second group can be simultaneously set to lower supply voltage while maintaining positive slack for all gates. The gates in the third group are assigned low voltage in small subgroups satisfying the condition that the sum of the delay increases due to voltage lowering for all gates in the subgroup is less