An activity-driven encoding scheme for power optimization in microprogrammed control unit

Authors:
Chuan-Yu Wang;Kaushik Roy
Affiliations:
Synopsys, Inc., Mountain View, CA;Synopsys, Inc., Mountain View, CA
Venue:
IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems
Year:
1999

Citing 0
Cited 2

Novel state minimization and state assignment in finite state machine design for low-power portable devices

Integration, the VLSI Journal
Novel state minimization and state assignment in finite state machine design for low-power portable devices

Integration, the VLSI Journal

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Abstract

With the high demand for reliability and further integration, power consumption has become a critical concern in today's very large scale integration design. Considering the different techniques to minimize power consumption and promote system's reliability, reducing switching activity of CMOS circuits is a promising area to be explored. In this paper, we present a encoding scheme to refine the control memory in a microprogrammed control unit, which can reduce switching activities within the control unit and on the path from control unit to data-processing unit. To achieve this, pseudo-Boolean programming techniques have been introduced to efficiently encode don't care bits in the control memory. Experiments have been conducted with a subset of 8086 instruction set. Results show that, 4.8%-16.5% reduction of switching activities can be obtained from the proposed encoding scheme.