Design and Implementation of Bit Transition Counter

In today’s VLSI system design, power consumption is gaining more attention as compared to performance and area. This is due to battery life in portable devices and operating frequency of the design. Power consumption mainly consists of static power, dynamic power, leakage power and short circuit power. Dynamic power is dominant among all which depends on many factors viz. power supply, load capacitance and frequency. Switching activity also affects dynamic power consumption of bus which is determined by calculating the number of bit transitions on bus. The purpose of this paper is to design a bit transition counter which can be used to calculate the switching activity of the circuit nodes. The novel feature is that it can be inserted at any node of the circuit, thus helpful for calculating power consumption of bus.