Low-Powered Self-Timed Pipeline with Variable-Grain Power Gating and Suspend-Free Voltage Scaling

This paper describes a variable-grain power gating and suspend-free voltage scaling scheme based on the self-timed pipeline (STP) circuits. The STP operates with its local hand-shake signal so that it does not require the global clock distribution, i.e., centralized control. Therefore, various power supply control for the STP can be naturally localized in both spatial and temporal domains without stopping its effective data transfer, e.g., program execution in case of microprocessors. As a result, the power supply scheme proposed in this paper can efficiently incorporate both commonly used voltage scaling (VS) and power gating (PG) techniques and it can further produce synergetic effects on its total amount of power saving. This paper reports evaluation results of the proposed scheme through actual power measurement of our fabricated STP-based data-