Design Guidance in the Power Dimension

Jan Rabaey, Lisa Guerra, Renu Mehra

This work proposes an approach for high level design guidance for low power using properties of given algorithms and architectures. Several relevant properties (operation count, the ratio of critical path to available time, spatial locality, and regularity) are identified and discussed, with quantitative measures being proposed for the latter two. Significant emphasis is placed on exploiting the regularity and spatial locality algorithm properties for the optimization of interconnect power. Examples illustrate the large savings that can be attained through property-based guidance of algorithm selection and architecture composition. Though demonstrated for ASIC designs, this approach is extensible to different hardware platforms and performance metrics (e.g. speed, area).