Low Power Design And Power Aware Verification

Until now, there has been a lack of a complete knowledge base to fully comprehend Low power (LP) design and power aware (PA) verification techniques and methodologies and deploy them all together in a real design verification and implementation project. This book is a first approach to establishing a comprehensive PA knowledge base. LP design, PA verification, and Unified Power Format (UPF) or IEEE-1801 power format standards are no longer special features. These technologies and methodologies are now part of industry-standard design, verification, and implementation flows (DVIF). Almost every chip design today incorporates some kind of low power technique either through power management on chip, by dividing the design into different voltage areas and controlling the voltages, through PA dynamic and PA static verification, or their combination. The entire LP design and PA verification process involves thousands of techniques, tools, and methodologies, employed from the r egister transfer level (RTL) of design abstraction down to the synthesis or place-and-route levels of physical design. These techniques, tools, and methodologies are evolving everyday through the progression of design-verification complexity and more intelligent ways of handling that complexity by engineers, researchers, and corporate engineering policy makers.

Until now, there has been a lack of a complete knowledge base to fully comprehend Low power (LP) design and power aware (PA) verification techniques and methodologies and deploy them all together in a real design verification and implementation project. This book is a first approach to establishing a comprehensive PA knowledge base. LP design, PA verification, and Unified Power Format (UPF) or IEEE-1801 power format standards are no longer special features. These technologies and methodologies are now part of industry-standard design, verification, and implementation flows (DVIF). Almost every chip design today incorporates some kind of low power technique either through power management on chip, by dividing the design into different voltage areas and controlling the voltages, through PA dynamic and PA static verification, or their combination. The entire LP design and PA verification process involves thousands of techniques, tools, and methodologies, employed from the r egister transfer level (RTL) of design abstraction down to the synthesis or place-and-route levels of physical design. These techniques, tools, and methodologies are evolving everyday through the progression of design-verification complexity and more intelligent ways of handling that complexity by engineers, researchers, and corporate engineering policy makers.

This book presents novel research techniques, algorithms, methodologies and experimental results for high level power estimation and power aware high-level synthesis. Readers will learn to apply such techniques to enable design flows resulting in shorter time to market and successful low power ASIC/FPGA design.

Design exibility and power consumption in addition to the cost, have always been the most important issues in design of integrated circuits (ICs), and are the main concerns of this research, as well. Energy Consumptions: Power dissipation (P ) and energy consumption are - diss pecially importantwhen there is a limited amountof power budgetor limited source of energy. Very common examples are portable systems where the battery life time depends on system power consumption. Many different techniques have been - veloped to reduce or manage the circuit power consumption in this type of systems. Ultra-low power (ULP) applications are another examples where power dissipation is the primary design issue. In such applications, the power budget is so restricted that very special circuit and system level design techniquesare needed to satisfy the requirements. Circuits employed in applications such as wireless sensor networks (WSN), wearable battery powered systems [1], and implantable circuits for biol- ical applications need to consume very low amount of power such that the entire system can survive for a very long time without the need for changingor recharging battery[2–4]. Using newpowersupplytechniquessuchas energyharvesting[5]and printable batteries [6], is another reason for reducing power dissipation. Devel- ing special design techniques for implementing low power circuits [7–9], as well as dynamic power management (DPM) schemes [10] are the two main approaches to control the system power consumption. Design Flexibility: Design exibility is the other important issue in modern in- grated systems.

Managing the power consumption of circuits and systems is now considered one of the most important challenges for the semiconductor industry. Elaborate power management strategies, such as dynamic voltage scaling, clock gating or power gating techniques, are used today to control the power dissipation during functional operation. The usage of these strategies has various implications on manufacturing test, and power-aware test is therefore increasingly becoming a major consideration during design-for-test and test preparation for low power devices. This book explores existing solutions for power-aware test and design-for-test of conventional circuits and systems, and surveys test strategies and EDA solutions for testing low power devices.

This book provides a practical guide for engineers doing low power System-on-Chip (SoC) designs. It covers various aspects of low power design from architectural issues and design techniques to circuit design of power gating switches. In addition to providing a theoretical basis for these techniques, the book addresses the practical issues of implementing them in today's designs with today's tools.

This book contains all the topics of importance to the low power designer. It first lays the foundation and then goes on to detail the design process. The book also discusses such special topics as power management and modal design, ultra low power, and low power design methodology and flows. In addition, coverage includes projections of the future and case studies.

Presents various aspects of power-aware design methodologies, covering the design hierarchy from technology, circuit logic, and architectural levels up to the system layer. This book includes discussion of techniques and methodologies for improving the power efficiency of CMOS circuits, systems on chip, microelectronic systems, and so on.

This volume features the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Workshop on Power and Timing Modeling, Optimization and Simulation. Papers cover high level design, low power design techniques, low power analog circuits, statistical static timing analysis, power modeling and optimization, low power routing optimization, security and asynchronous design, low power applications, modeling and optimization, and more.

The book provides a comprehensive coverage of different aspects of low power circuit synthesis at various levels of design hierarchy; starting from the layout level to the system level. For a seamless understanding of the subject, basics of MOS circuits has been introduced at transistor, gate and circuit level; followed by various low-power design methodologies, such as supply voltage scaling, switched capacitance minimization techniques and leakage power minimization approaches. The content of this book will prove useful to students, researchers, as well as practicing engineers.