Design Methodologies and CAD Tools for Leakage Power Optimization in FPGAs

The scaling of the CMOS technology has precipitated an exponential increase in both subthreshold and gate leakage currents in modern VLSI designs. Consequently, the contribution of leakage power to the total chip power dissipation for CMOS designs is increasing rapidly, which is estimated to be 40% for the current technology generations and is expected to exceed 50% by the 65nm CMOS technology. In FPGAs, the power dissipation problem is further aggravated when compared to ASIC designs because FPGA use more transistors per logic function when compared to ASIC designs. Consequently, solving the leakage power problem is pivotal to devising power-aware FPGAs in the nanometer regime. This thesis focuses on devising both architectural and CAD techniques for leakage mitigation in FPGAs. Several CAD and architectural modifications are proposed to reduce the impact of leakage power dissipation on modern FPGAs. Firstly, multi-threshold CMOS (MTCMOS) techniques are introduced to FPGAs to permanently turn OFF the unused resources of the FPGA, FPGAs are characterized with low utilization percentages that can reach 60%. Moreover, such architecture enables the dynamic shutting down of the FPGA idle parts, thus reducing the standby leakage significantly. Employing the MTCMOS technique in FPGAs requires several changes to the FPGA architecture, including the placement and routing of the sleep signals and the MTCMOS granularity. On the CAD level, the packing and placement stages are modified to allow the possibility of dynamically turning OFF the idle parts of the FPGA. A new activity generation algorithm is proposed and implemented that aims to identify the logic blocks in a design that exhibit similar idleness periods. Several criteria for the activity generation algorithm are used, including connectivity and logic function. Several versions of the activity generation algorithm are implemented to trade power savings with runtime. A newly developed packing algorithm uses the resulting activities to minimize leakage power dissipation by packing the logic blocks with similar or close activities together. By proposing an FPGA architecture that supports MTCMOS and developing a CAD tool that supports the new architecture, an average power savings of 30% is achieved for a 90nm CMOS process while incurring a speed penalty of less than 5%. This technique is further extended to provide a timing-sensitive version of the CAD flow to vary the speed penalty according to the criticality of each logic block. Secondly, a new technique for leakage power reduction in FPGAs based on the use of input dependency is developed. Both subthreshold and gate leakage power are heavily dependent on the input state. In FPGAs, the effect of input dependency is exacerbated due to the use of pass-transistor multiplexer logic, which can exhibit up to 50% variation in leakage power due to the input states. In this thesis, a new algorithm is proposed that uses bit permutation to reduce subthreshold and gate leakage power dissipation in FPGAs. The bit permutation algorithm provides an average leakage power reduction of 40% while having less than 2% impact on the performance and no penalty on the design area. Thirdly, an accurate probabilistic power model for FPGAs is developed to quantify the savings from the proposed leakage power reduction techniques. The proposed power model accounts for dynamic, short circuit, and leakage power (including both subthreshold and gate leakage power) dissipation in FPGAs. Moreover, the power model accounts for power due to glitches, which accounts for almost 20% of the dynamic power dissipation in FPGAs. The use of probabilities in the power model makes it more computationally efficient than the other FPGA power models in the literature that rely on long input sequence simulations. One of the main advantages of the proposed power model is the incorporation of spatial correlation while estimating the signal probability. Other probabilistic FPGA power models assume spatial independence among the design signals, thus overestimating the power calculations. In the proposed model, a probabilistic model is proposed for spatial correlations among the design signals. Moreover, a different variation is proposed that manages to capture most of the spatial correlations with minimum impact on runtime. Furthermore, the proposed power model accounts for the input dependency of subthreshold and gate leakage power dissipation. By comparing the proposed power model to HSpice simulation, the estimated power is within 8% and is closer to HSpice simulations than other probabilistic FPGA power models by an average of 20%

Design and Analysis of an Asynchronous Microcontroller

This dissertation presents the design of the most complex MTNCL circuit to date. A fully functional MTNCL MSP430 microcontroller is designed and benchmarked against an open source synchronous MSP430. The designs are compared in terms of area, active energy, and leakage energy. Techniques to reduce MTNCL pipeline activity and improve MTNCL register file area and power consumption are introduced. The results show the MTNCL design to have superior leakage power characteristics. The area and active energy comparisons highlight the need for better MTNCL logic synthesis techniques

Minimizing and exploiting leakage in VLSI

Power consumption of VLSI (Very Large Scale Integrated) circuits has been growing at an alarmingly rapid rate. This increase in power consumption, coupled with the increasing demand for portable/hand-held electronics, has made power consumption a dominant concern in the design of VLSI circuits today. Traditionally dynamic (switching) power has dominated the total power consumption of VLSI circuits. However, due to process scaling trends, leakage power has now become a major component of the total power consumption in VLSI circuits. This dissertation explores techniques to reduce leakage, as well as techniques to exploit leakage currents through the use of sub-threshold circuits. This dissertation consists of two studies. In the first study, techniques to reduce leakage are presented. These include a low leakage ASIC design methodology that uses high VT sleep transistors selectively, a methodology that combines input vector control and circuit modification, and a scheme to find the optimum reverse body bias voltage to minimize leakage. As the minimum feature size of VLSI fabrication processes continues to shrink with each successive process generation (along with the value of supply voltage and therefore the threshold voltage of the devices), leakage currents increase exponentially. Leakage currents are hence seen as a necessary evil in traditional VLSI design methodologies. We present an approach to turn this problem into an opportunity. In the second study in this dissertation, we attempt to exploit leakage currents to perform computation. We use sub-threshold digital circuits and come up with ways to get around some of the pitfalls associated with sub-threshold circuit design. These include a technique that uses body biasing adaptively to compensate for Process, Voltage and Temperature (PVT) variations, a design approach that uses asynchronous micro-pipelined Network of Programmable Logic Arrays (NPLAs) to help improve the throughput of sub-threshold designs, and a method to find the optimum supply voltage that minimizes energy consumption in a circuit

POWER REDUCTION IN MODERN VLSI CIRCUITS – A REVIEW

This paper focuses on the importance of reducing power consumption by VLSI circuits using different power reduction techniques. In this paper, various sources of power dissipation in modern VLSI circuits along with various power reduction techniques as adopted in industry today are discussed

Enhancing Power Efficient Design Techniques in Deep Submicron Era

Excessive power dissipation has been one of the major bottlenecks for design and manufacture in the past couple of decades. Power efficient design has become more and more challenging when technology scales down to the deep submicron era that features the dominance of leakage, the manufacture variation, the on-chip temperature variation and higher reliability requirements, among others. Most of the computer aided design (CAD) tools and algorithms currently used in industry were developed in the pre deep submicron era and did not consider the new features explicitly and adequately. Recent research advances in deep submicron design, such as the mechanisms of leakage, the source and characterization of manufacture variation, the cause and models of on-chip temperature variation, provide us the opportunity to incorporate these important issues in power efficient design. We explore this opportunity in this dissertation by demonstrating that significant power reduction can be achieved with only minor modification to the existing CAD tools and algorithms. First, we consider peak current, which has become critical for circuit's reliability in deep submicron design. Traditional low power design techniques focus on the reduction of average power. We propose to reduce peak current while keeping the overhead on average power as small as possible. Second, dual Vt technique and gate sizing have been used simultaneously for leakage savings. However, this approach becomes less effective in deep submicron design. We propose to use the newly developed process-induced mechanical stress to enhance its performance. Finally, in deep submicron design, the impact of on-chip temperature variation on leakage and performance becomes more and more significant. We propose a temperature-aware dual Vt approach to alleviate hot spots and achieve further leakage reduction. We also consider this leakage-temperature dependency in the dynamic voltage scaling approach and discover that a commonly accepted result is incorrect for the current technology. We conduct extensive experiments with popular design benchmarks, using the latest industry CAD tools and design libraries. The results show that our proposed enhancements are promising in power saving and are practical to solve the low power design challenges in deep submicron era

A Combined Gate Replacement and Input Vector Control Approach

Due to the increasing role of leakage power in CMOS circuit's total power dissipation, leakage reduction has attracted a lot of attention recently. Input vector control (IVC) takes advantage of the transistor stack effect to apply the minimum leakage vector (MLV) to the primary inputs of the circuit during the standby mode. However, IVC techniques become less effective for circuits of large logic depth because theMLV at primary inputs has little impact on internal gates at high logic level. In this paper, we propose a technique to overcome this limitation by directly controlling the inputs to the internal gates that are in their worst leakage states. Specifically, we propose a gate replacement technique that replaces such gates by other library gates while maintaining the circuit's correct functionality at the active mode. This modification of the circuit does not require changes of the design flow, but it opens the door for further leakage reduction, when the MLV is not effective. We then describe a divideand- conquer approach that combines the gate replacement and input vector control techniques. It integrates an algorithm that finds the optimal MLV for tree circuits, a fast gate replacement heuristic, and a genetic algorithm that connects the tree circuits. We have conducted experiments on all the MCNC91 benchmark circuits. The results reveal that 1) the gate replacement technique itself can provide 10% more leakage current reduction over the best known IVC methods with no delay penalty and little area increase; 2) the divide-and-conquer approach outperforms the best pure IVC method by 24% and the existing control point insertion method by 12%; 3) when we obtain the optimal MLV for small circuits from exhaustive search, the proposed gate replacement alone can still reduce leakage current by 13% while the divide-and-conquer approach reduces 17%

Ultra-Low Power and Radiation Hardened Asynchronous Circuit Design

This dissertation proposes an ultra-low power design methodology called bit-wise MTNCL for bit-wise pipelined asynchronous circuits, which combines multi-threshold CMOS (MTCMOS) with bit-wise pipelined NULL Convention Logic (NCL) systems. It provides the leakage power advantages of an all high-Vt implementation with a reasonable speed penalty compared to the all low-Vt implementation, and has negligible area overhead. It was enhanced to handle indeterminate standby states. The original MTNCL concept was enhanced significantly by sleeping Registers and Completion Logic as well as Combinational circuits to reduce area, leakage power, and energy per operation. This dissertation also develops an architecture that allows NCL circuits to recover from a Single Event Upset (SEU) or Single Event Latchup (SEL) fault without any data loss. Finally, an accurate throughput derivation formula for pipelined NCL circuits was developed, which can be used for static timing analysis

Variability-Aware VLSI Design Automation For Nanoscale Technologies

As technology scaling enters the nanometer regime, design of large scale ICs gets more challenging due to shrinking feature sizes and increasing design complexity. Aggressive scaling causes significant degradation in reliability, increased susceptibility to fabrication and environmental randomness and increased dynamic and leakage power dissipation. In this work, we investigate these scaling issues in large scale integrated systems. This dissertation proposes to develop variability-aware design methodologies by proposing design analysis, design-time optimization, post-silicon tunability and runtime-adaptivity based optimization techniques for handling variability. We discuss our research in the area of variability-aware analysis, specifically focusing on the problem of statistical timing analysis. The first technique presents the concept of error budgeting that achieves significant runtime speedups during statistical timing analysis. The second work presents a general framework for non-linear non-Gaussian statistical timing analysis considering correlations. Further, we present our work on design-time optimization schemes that are applicable during physical synthesis. Firstly, we present a buffer insertion technique that considers wire-length uncertainty and proposes algorithms to perform probabilistic buffer insertion. Secondly, we present a stochastic optimization framework based on Monte-Carlo technique considering fabrication variability. This optimization framework can be applied to problems that can be modeled as linear programs without without imposing any assumptions on the nature of the variability. Subsequently, we present our work on post-silicon tunability based design optimization. This work presents a design management framework that can be used to balance the effort spent on pre-silicon (through gate sizing) and post-silicon optimization (through tunable clock-tree buffers) while maximizing the yield gains. Lastly, we present our work on variability-aware runtime optimization techniques. We look at the problem of runtime supply voltage scaling for dynamic power optimization, and propose a framework to consider the impact of variability on the reliability of such designs. We propose a probabilistic design synthesis technique where reliability of the design is a primary optimization metric