We propose a power optimization method considering glitch reduction by gate sizing. Our method reduces not only the amount of capacitive and short-circuit power consumption but also the power dissipated by glitches which has not been exploited previously. In the optimization method, we improve the accuracy of statistical glitch estimation method and device a gate sizing algorithm that utilizes perturbations for escaping a bad local solution. The effect of our method is verified experimentally using 12 benchmark circuits with a 0.5 m standard cell library. Gate sizing reduces the number of glitch transitions by 38.2 % on average and by 63.4 % maximum. This results in the reduction of total transitions by 12.8 % on average. When the circuits are optimized for power without delay constraints, the power dissipation is reduced by 7.4 % on average and by 15.7 % maximum further from the minimum-sized circuits.
½ ÁÒØÖÓ Ù Ø ÓÒThe dynamic power dissipation, which is the dominant source of power dissipation, is directly related to the number of signal transitions in a circuit. A signal transition can be classified into two categories; a functional transition(steady-state transition) and a spurious transition(glitch). It is well known that glitches occupy a considerable amount in the signal transitions of a circuit. Reference [1] indicates that the glitch power dissipation accounts for 20% to 70%, and Ref.[2] says 7% to 43%. Also glitches are extremely sensitive to signal propagation characteristics(delay) [3]. If we properly optimize timing characteristics such that the number of glitches is minimized, and if the area(power) cost for the optimization is small, we can expect that the power cost is well overcompensated and overall power dissipation is reduced by the glitch reduction.Gate sizing is an effective method for delay optimization and many solutions are proposed such as Refs. [4,5,6]. Gate sizing has been utilized not only for delay optimization but also for power optimization [7,8,9,10]. The main idea of previous approaches for power reduction is to optimize the amount of capacitive load [7,8] or the amount of capacitive load and short-circuit current [9,10] based on the transition activity information obtained beforehand. The transition activity, however, is affected by the sizing operation, which is not considered in the optimization. Although Ref. [10] proposes to update the transition information a few times during the optimization, it is not enough to fully consider the sensitivity of glitch activity with respect to timing modification cased by a sizing operation. None of the previous approaches explicitly optimize the number of transitions for power reduction. In this paper, we propose a power optimization method considering glitch reduction by gate sizing. Our method utilizes the sensitivity for reducing power consumed by glitches.Our optimization method consists of two techniques; a statistical estimation method of glitch activities and an optimization algorithm for gate sizing. For the estimation of glitch...