Open AccessFine‐Grained FSMD Power Gating Considering Power Overhead
Author(s) -
Shin ChiHoon,
Oh MyeongHoon,
Sim JaeWoo,
Jeong JaeChan,
Kim Seong Woon
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
etri journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.295
H-Index - 46
eISSN - 2233-7326
pISSN - 1225-6463
DOI - 10.4218/etrij.11.0210.0328
Subject(s) - datapath , power gating , overhead (engineering) , power (physics) , gating , microprocessor , computer science , electronic engineering , engineering , embedded system , electrical engineering , transistor , voltage , physics , physiology , quantum mechanics , biology
As a fine‐grained power gating method for achieving greater power savings, our approach takes advantage of the finite state machine with a datapath (FSMD) characteristic which shows sequential idleness among subcircuits. In an FSMD‐based power gating, while only an active subcircuit is expected to be turned on, more subcircuits should be activated due to the power overhead. To reduce the number of missed opportunities for power savings, we deactivated some of the turned‐on subcircuits by slowing the FSMD down and predicting its behavior. Our microprocessor experiments showed that the power savings are close to the upper bound.