Challenges in clockgating for a low power ASIC methodology
ISLPED '99 Proceedings of the 1999 international symposium on Low power electronics and design
Saving Power by Synthesizing Gated Clocks for Sequential Circuits
IEEE Design & Test
Post-layout leakage power minimization based on distributed sleep transistor insertion
Proceedings of the 2004 international symposium on Low power electronics and design
Timing-driven row-based power gating
ISLPED '07 Proceedings of the 2007 international symposium on Low power electronics and design
DSD '08 Proceedings of the 2008 11th EUROMICRO Conference on Digital System Design Architectures, Methods and Tools
Low Power Methodology Manual: For System-on-Chip Design
Low Power Methodology Manual: For System-on-Chip Design
Design of a flexible reactivation cell for safe power-mode transition in power-gated circuits
IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems Part I: Regular Papers
Enabling concurrent clock and power gating in an industrial design flow
Proceedings of the Conference on Design, Automation and Test in Europe
Geyser-1: a MIPS R3000 CPU core with fine-grained run-time power gating
Proceedings of the 2010 Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference
Fast computation of discharge current upper bounds for clustered power gating
IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems
Automatic synthesis of low-power gated-clock finite-state machines
IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems
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Concurrent clock gating (CG) and power gating (PG) can help to tackle both static and dynamic power simultaneously, thereby enabling the design of low-power and energy efficient applications. Unfortunately the automatic integration of the two techniques in standard design flows is limited by several technical impediments. Among them, physical constraints during the Sleep Transistor Insertion (STI) imposed by rowbased layout rules are certainly the most critical. Although determining the feasibility of the whole clock-gating and power-gating (CG-PG) integration, the adopted STI methodology may have drastic effects on several circuit metrics, like operating frequency, throughput and power savings. In this paper we introduce a layout-friendly STI approach for fine-grained CG-PG inclusion. The proposed method, that is aware of the timing-driven strategies adopted by most of the commercial placer tools, allows sub-row insertion of independent sleep-transistor cells, therefore enabling finer resolution in the CG-PG integration, along with minimal cell displacement and negligible layout disruption. This enables a larger number of cells to be power-gated (i.e., larger potential power-savings w.r.t. state-of-the-art fine-grained STI strategies), without delay overhead. Experimental results, conducted on a set of circuit benchmarks mapped onto an industrial 65nm technology, indicate that more than 50% of the total number of cells can be clock- and power-gated simultaneously, without any speed degradation.