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Fig. 18 shows the percentage power
reduction and area overhead when all the proposed techniques are
applied (, for IAPO-gated circuits) compared to IUPO and AO
circuits. The area overhead for some benchmarks is negative, which
means the proposed techniques also reduced the circuit area. For
all the benchmarks, an average 26.8% total power reduction is
achieved compared to IUPO circuits with 0.5% area overhead.
Compared to AO circuits, the average power reduction is 56.0%
with 44.4% average area overhead.
Figure 18:
Total power reduction and area overhead.
|
It is worth noting that compared with that of AO circuits,
interconnect power of IAPO ones is significantly reduced in spite
of the area increase. Intuitively, bigger circuits would be
expected to have longer interconnects and to spend more power in
them. In IAPO circuits, however, our techniques tried to ensure
that units exchanging high-switching data can be floorplanned as
close to each other as possible, reduce switching activity for
data transfer, and also minimize the number of long data-transfer
wires. Therefore, although we have a bigger circuit, we have fewer
power-hungry interconnects and fewer long interconnects as shown
in Figures 16 and
17. In the case of IAPO circuits,
interconnect topology and switching activity distribution is
optimized. This is why interconnect power consumption is reduced
even when circuit area is increased.
Next: Commercial tools
Up: Experimental Results
Previous: Interconnect power reduction
Lin Zhong
2003-10-11