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.

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.

The Information and communication technology (ICT) industry is said to account for 2% of the worldwide carbon emissions – a fraction that continues to grow with the relentless push for more and more sophisticated computing equipment, c- munications infrastructure, and mobile devices. While computers evolved in the directionofhigherandhigherperformanceformostofthelatterhalfofthe20thc- tury, the late 1990’s and early 2000’ssaw a new emergingfundamentalconcern that has begun to shape our day-to-day thinking in system design – power dissipation. As we elaborate in Chapter 1, a variety of factors colluded to raise power-ef?ciency as a ?rst class design concern in the designer’s mind, with profound consequences all over the ?eld: semiconductor process design, circuit design, design automation tools, system and application software, all the way to large data centers. Power-ef?cient System Design originated from a desire to capture and highlight the exciting developments in the rapidly evolving ?eld of power and energy op- mization in electronic and computer based systems. Tremendous progress has been made in the last two decades, and the topic continues to be a fascinating research area. To develop a clearer focus, we have concentrated on the relatively higher level of design abstraction that is loosely called the system level. In addition to the ext- sive coverage of traditional power reduction targets such as CPU and memory, the book is distinguished by detailed coverage of relatively modern power optimization ideas focussing on components such as compilers, operating systems, servers, data centers, and graphics processors.

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.

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.