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U. Glaeser

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Also, the area made available from feature size reductions is immediately filled up with more transistors—<br />

for larger caches and increased instruction-level parallelism, in case of processors. For example, the<br />

Pentium Pro, the successor of the Pentium, has 70% more transistors and about 50% more power<br />

consumption at 200 MHz.<br />

The trend in special purpose ICs is also to push the limits of integration by integrating as much<br />

functionality on a chip as possible. The goal of a host of multimedia capabilities on a single chip was<br />

being sought in earnest. These capabilities are now real but power consumption has gone up. Integration<br />

helps to reduce the overall power for the system. A rule of thumb stated is that four devices incorporated<br />

into an IC consume only half as much power as would be the case if they were configured as discrete<br />

components; however, it also implies that the power dissipation burden on the resulting single IC will<br />

increase. Thus, the current trends indicate that the voltage and feature size reduction notwithstanding,<br />

the power consumption problem in ICs will only get worse in the future. Therefore, it is important to<br />

explore other avenues of power reduction as described below.<br />

Reduction of Switched Capacitance<br />

The parameters N and Cout in Eq. (14.2) provide the other set of avenues for power reduction. Their<br />

product N × C can be called the average switched capacitance per cycle (referred to as switched capacitance)<br />

of the circuit. Reduction in switched capacitance is in general orthogonal to the power reduction<br />

techniques described previously. It can therefore lead to power reductions beyond what is possible by<br />

voltage scaling alone. It may also be the only option if the large investments in time and money associated<br />

with the migration to newer processes and lower voltages are not feasible. Reduction in switched capacitance<br />

has thus been the subject of intense study in recent years since the last 10 years or so. Ideas and<br />

techniques at all levels of the design process are being developed. Figure 14.5 presents an overview of the<br />

salient directions that are being pursued in today’s designs. Some of these are aimed specifically at<br />

reducing N or N × Cout. Others represent well-established design/synthesis problem domains, in which<br />

N × Cout can be considered as an additional target metric. The aim of all of these is to reduce N × Cout. It should be kept in mind that these efforts are not isolated from one another. Thus, the impact of design<br />

decisions at any level cuts across other levels of the hierarchy too. Overviews of the published work in<br />

this area are available in several references [1,5,6].<br />

FIGURE 14.5 Directions for reducing capacitance.<br />

© 2002 by CRC Press LLC<br />

-Choice of Hardware vs. Software<br />

-System Partitioning for reduced<br />

communication<br />

-Integrated vs discrete modules<br />

-Software design<br />

(system software, algorithms,<br />

code generation)<br />

-System power management<br />

-Combinational Optimizations<br />

(Technology dependent/independent)<br />

-Sequential optimizations<br />

-Gate resizing<br />

-Custom design for functional modules<br />

-Wasteful activity elimination<br />

-Low parasitic capacitance<br />

materials and processes. Silicon<br />

-Low capacitance packaging<br />

System<br />

Architecture<br />

Logic/RTL Trans<br />

Circuit<br />

Technology<br />

Levels of Abstraction<br />

-Instruction set design<br />

-Data representation and coding<br />

-Exploiting locality (cache hierarchy)<br />

-Algorithmic transformations<br />

-Sharing vs. partitioning<br />

-Selective power down<br />

-Gate and wire sizing<br />

-Floorplanning<br />

-Placement<br />

-Routing<br />

-Improved cell libraries

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