Wang Yu, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
Lin Hai, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
Luo Rong, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
Wang Hui, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
With the growing scaling of technology, leakage power dissipation has become a critical issue of VLSI circuits and systems designs. Multi-threshold CMOS leads to about 10X leakage reduction in circuit standby mode. In this paper, we reduce leakage current through fine-grain sleep transistor (ST) insertion which makes it easier to guarantee circuit functionality at high speed and improves circuit noise margins [1]. We model the leakage current reduction problem as a mixed-integer linear programming (MLP) problem in order to simultaneously choose where to add the sleep transistors and the sleep transistors? sizes optimally. The model is solved with both continuous (MLP-C) and discrete (MLP-D) sleep transistor size constraints. Furthermore a method to speed up MLP-D model is introduced. Because of the better circuit slack utilization, our experimental results show that the MLP-C model can achieve 79.75%, 93.56%, 94.99% leakage saving when the circuit slow down is 0%, 3%, 5% respectively. The MLP-C model also achieves on average 74.79% less area penalty compared to the conventional fixed slowdown method when the circuit slowdown is 7%. The MLP-D model can achieve similar leakage saving compared to the MLP-C model. The MLP-CtoD method can speed up the MLP-D model 30X times with almost no difference in leakage reduction.
Citation:
Wang Yu, Lin Hai, Yang Huazhong, Luo Rong, Wang Hui, "Simultaneous Fine-grain Sleep Transistor Placement and Sizing for Leakage Optimization," isqed, pp.723-728, 7th International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design (ISQED'06), 2006