Behavioral synthesis with activating unused flip-flops for reducing glitch power in FPGA

Abstract

In this paper we discuss optimizing the interconnect power of designs implemented in FPGA platforms. In particular, we reduce the glitch power on interconnects associated with the output of functional units in a design. The idea is to activate unused flip-flops to block the propagation of glitches, which takes advantage of the abundant flip-flops in modern FPGA structures. Since the activation of additional flip-flops may cause data hazard problems, we develop several effective behavioral synthesis techniques to prevent such data hazards. We also study the optimality of our techniques. The experimental results show that on average, our methods lead to a 28% reduction in dynamic power in the Xilinx Virtex-II platform.