Fine-Grained Supply Gating Through Hypergraph Partitioning and Shannon Decomposition for Active Power Reduction

Temporal and spatial idleness exploitation for optimal-grained leakage control

“…Fine-Grained Power Gating Various aspects of the fine-grained approach have been studied, such as sizing [2], wake-up time [3], robustness issues [4] and circuit clustering schemes [5,6,7]. We will focus on the circuit clustering schemes in this paper.…”

“…Precisely, the scheme in [7] can yield negative energy saving if clock gating signals flip frequently. The schemes in [5,6] can yield negative energy saving if the internal mutual exclusion signals flip frequently. In addition, up to 36% area overhead were reported in [5,6].…”

“…Bhunia et al [5] proposed a Shannon expansion based clustering method to apply PG. Leinweber et al [6] improved the method in [5] by performing hypergraph partitioning before Shannon expansion. Usami et al [7] proposed to use clock gating signals as references to cluster a circuit into several PG domains.…”

“…Hence in our method, we only exploit mutual exclusion for the clusters, whose steering signals are primary inputs, such as M2 in Figure 9. The studies in [5,6] …”

“…Most current RTLC designs adopt block level, or coarse-grained approach. In order to achieve more aggressive leakage reduction, fine-grained approach has been proposed recently [2,3,4,5,6,7]. Take PG for example.…”