The stringent power budget of fine grained power managed digital integrated
circuits have driven chip designers to optimize power at the cost of area and
delay, which were the traditional cost criteria for circuit optimization. The
emerging scenario motivates us to revisit the classical operator scheduling
problem under the availability of DVFS enabled functional units that can
trade-off cycles with power. We study the design space defined due to this
trade-off and present a branch-and-bound(B/B) algorithm to explore this state
space and report the pareto-optimal front with respect to area and power. The
scheduling also aims at maximum resource sharing and is able to attain
sufficient area and power gains for complex benchmarks when timing constraints
are relaxed by sufficient amount. Experimental results show that the algorithm
that operates without any user constraint(area/power) is able to solve the
problem for most available benchmarks, and the use of power budget or area
budget constraints leads to significant performance gain.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figures, International journal of VLSI design &
Communication Systems (VLSICS