Power management techniques for control-flow intensive designs

Abstract

This paper presents a low-overhead controller-based power management technique that re-specifies control signals to reconfigure existing multiplexer networks and functional units to minimize unnecessary activity. We demonstrate that conventional power management techniques may often not be suited to control-flow intensive designs, and provide a comprehensive analysis of the potential negative effects of power management on circuit delay, glitching activity at control and data path signals, and formation of false combinational cycles. We present techniques to perform power management through controller re-specification while avoiding the above negative effects, and demonstrate the efficiency of the techniques through experiments.