IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VERY LARGE SCALE INTEGRATTION VLSI SYSTEMS VOL NO DECEMBER Energy Minimization Using Multiple Supply Voltages

We present a dynamic programming technique for solving the multiple supply voltage scheduling problem in both non pipelined and functionally pipelined data paths The scheduling problem refers to the assignment of a sup ply voltage level selected from a xed and known number of voltage levels to each operation in a data ow graph so as to minimize the average energy consumption for given computation time or throughput constraints or both The energy model is accurate and accounts for the input pattern dependencies re convergent fanout induced dependencies and the energy cost of level shifters Experimental results show that using three supply voltage levels on a number of standard benchmarks an average energy saving of with a computation time constraint of times the criti cal path delay can be obtained compared to using a single supply voltage level