Low-Power Design for Embedded Processor

1. Low-Power Design for Embedded Processor

2. Low-Power Design for Embedded Processor • Minimization of power consumption in portable and battery-powered embedded systems has become an important aspect of processor and system design. • Opportunities for design tradeoffs emphasizing low power are available across the entire spectrum of the overall design process. • From algorithm selection to silicon process technology • Generally, the higher the level of abstraction, the greater the opportunity for power savings.

3. Power Dissipation in CMOS Circuits • Power dissipated in CMOS circuits • Pswitching and Pshortcircuit are present when a device is actively changing state, while the component Pstatic and Pleakage are present regardless of state changes

4. Power Dissipation in CMOS Circuits • Pswitching: power required to charge or switch capacitive load • Reduction of supply voltage is an obvious candidate technique for power reduction • Performance reduced as Vdd is lowered due to reduced saturation current to charge and discharge load capacitance • Energy-delay product is minimized when Vdd is equal to 2*Vthreshold • However, as Vthreashold decreases, leakage current increases exponentially * A.Bellaur and M.I. Elmasry, Low Power Digital CMOS Design: Circuits and Systems, Kluwer 1996

5. Power Dissipation in CMOS Circuits • Pshortcircuit: power consumed during output transitions of CMOS gates as the input switches • Imean represents the average current drawn during the input transistion • For a single gate, Imean becomes smaller with shorter input rise and fall times, and with long output transition • When a set of gates is considered, it is generally optimal to have equal input and output transition times • Pstatic: static power consumed by the deice • not usually a factor in pure CMOS designs, since static current is not drawn by a CMOS gate • But certain circuit structures contribute to overall power • E.g, sense amplifiers, voltage reference and constant current sources

6. Power Dissipation in CMOS Circuits • Pleakage: leakage power consumed by the device • Due to leakage currents from reversed biased PN junctions associated with source and drain of MOS transistors, as well as subthreshold conduction currents. • The leakage components proportional to device area and exponentially dependent on temperature • The subthreshold leakage component is strongly dependent on device threshold voltages, and becomes an important factor as power supply voltage scaling is used to lower power • For systems with a high ratio of standby operation to active operation, Pleakage may be the dominant factor

7. Design Techniques for Power Reduction- Algorithmic • Selection of an algorithm is generally based on details of an underlying implementation • Cost of addition versus a logical operation • Cost of memory access • Locality of references • Presence of cache memory • Loop unrolling is also of benefit, as it results in minimized loop overhead • Number representations offer another area for algorithmic power tradeoffs. • E.g., fixed-point or floating-point, signed-magnitude or two’s complement • Operator precision, or bit length • Trade off between power and accuracy

8. Design Techniques for Power Reduction- Architectural • Instruction set design and exploitation of parallelism and pipelining are important • Architecture-driven voltage scaling • Lowering supply voltage to reduce power consumption • Apply parallelism and/or pipelining to maintain throughput • Useful if enough parallelism exists but latency and area overhead increases • Low-power designs tend to avoid deep pipelining • unless the amount of speculation is limited, the overhead for speculation is low, and accuracy of speculation is high

9. Design Techniques for Power Reduction- Architectural • Instruction set can have a large effect on power dissipation as well as performance • By careful selection of instruction semantics and immediate/displacement widths, the size of code can be reduced to 70% • Utilizing cache memory • Given that accessing the next level of the memory hierarchy can result in 20x greater power consumption, the reduction in miss rate due to doubling cache size is significant.

10. Design Techniques for Power Reduction- Logic and Circuit Level • Many techniques for power reduction are available at the logic and circuit level • Most focus on reducing the effective switched capacitance(Ceff) • Others focus on reduced signal swing, thus avoiding the quadratic dependence on supply voltage • Static and dynamic (clocked) logic families are both utilized in CMOS designs. • Depending on signal probabilities, one or the other may offer reduced Ceff

11. Design Techniques for Power Reduction- Logic and Circuit Level • Logic restructuring for glitch elimination • Static logic may suffer form hazards (or glitches) that result in unnecessary power consumption • Logic restructuring and path delay balancing may be used to reduce glitch power Hazard Generation Restructured logic to remove hazard A. Raghunathan, et al., “Register transfer level power optimization with emphasis on glitch analysis and reduction,” TCAD 1999

12. Design Techniques for Power Reduction- Logic and Circuit Level • Equivalent logic mappings with different power cost • Transition probabilities of the logic being mapped are used in conjunction with loading models of the library elements • Select a mapping of the desired Boolean function onto a set of gates which minimized power p is the transition probability of a node in a dynamic logic = probability of the output being 0 V. Tiwari et al., “Technology mapping for low power,” DAC 1993

13. Design Techniques for Power Reduction- Logic and Circuit Level • Input and transistor reordering affect • the amount of switched internal capacitance of the gate, • the speed of the gate • The static power dissipation • Inputs signals with high probability of being off are placed nearest the output node When, PA(1) > PB(1) > PC(1) W.-Z. Shen et al., “Transistor reordering rules for power reduction in CMOS gates,” ASP-DAC 1995

14. Design Techniques for Power Reduction- Logic and Circuit Level • Clock power reduction • Clock power reduction is important in synchronous systems • Can contribute to a large portion of the overall power budget • 30%-40% of total system power is consumed by clock generation and distribution • Clock distribution optimization • Clock gating • Low-swing clocking techniques

15. Design Techniques for Power Reduction- Logic and Circuit Level • Clock distribution • Efficient distribution and gating mechanisms are essential • Example: two-level clock distribution network

16. Design Techniques for Power Reduction- Logic and Circuit Level • Gated clocking • Commonly applied techniques • Gating off of clock signals to registers, latches and clock regenerators • When there is no required activity to be performed • May be applied at the function unit level or entire subsystems • Overhead associated with generation of the enable signal must be considered

17. Design Techniques for Power Reduction- Logic and Circuit Level • Reduced swing clocking • Reducing clock driver supply voltage by 50% and providing specially designed flip-flops • Theoretical power saving of 75% and reported savings of 63% • Increases flip-flop delay by > 2x • Differential clock signaling • Allows the clock swing to be reduced well below 50% of Vdd • Typically consumes static power • With 0.2xVdd swing, theoretical saving in the clock network is 60% H. Kojima et al. “Half-swing clocking scheme for 75% power saving in clocking circuitry,” JSSC 1995 J.-C. Kim, “A high-speed 50% power saving half-swing clocking scheme for flip-flop with complementary gate and source drive,” ICVC 1999

18. Design Techniques for Power Reduction- Logic and Circuit Level • Precomputation structure • Minimizes switching activity by selectively precomputing the output values of a logic circuit before they are required • And then using the computed values to minimize switching activity by disabling inputs • Reported power saving is 11%-66% Subset of terms which makes F = 1 Subset of terms which makes F = 0

19. Design Techniques for Power Reduction- Device Technology • Threshold voltage selection • Plays an important role in the tradeoff between performance and leakage power • Silicon on Insulator(SOI) • Attractive due to lowered parasitic capacitance and reduced body effect • Dual device threshold technologies • Also an approach to lowering power consumption • High-threshold devices for non-critical delay paths • Low-threshold devices for speed-critical paths • Minimizing standby power consumption • Well biasing • Raises the threshold of all devices • Reduces standby power

20. Standby Power Reduction

21. Standby Power Modes

22. Hitachi SH4 Substrate Bias Technique

23. Hitachi SH4 Substrate Bias Technique

24. Intel XScale Leakage Control

25. Intel XScale Power Modes

26. Super Cut-off CMOS (SCCMOS)

27. Delay Comparison (Inverter & NAND)

28. Structural and Dynamic Techniques

29. Voltage Scaling

30. Dual-VTH Concept