Data Driven Power Optimization of Sequential Circuits

Abstract

In this paper we present an efficient technique to reduce the power dissipation in a technology mapped CMOS sequential circuit based on logic and structural transformations. The power reduction is achieved by adding sequential redundancies from low switching activity gates to high switching activity gates (targets) such that the switching activities at the output of the targets are significantly reduced. We show that the power reducing transformations result in a circuit that is a valid replacement of the original. The notion of validity used here is that of a delay safe replacement [11, 12]. The potential transformations are found by direct logic implications applied to the circuit netlist. Therefore the complexity of the proposed transformation is polynomial in the size of the circuit, allowing the processing of large designs