Power-Profiler: Optimizing ASICs Power Consumption at the Behavioral Level

Abstract

This paper presents a methodology and tool (Power-Profiler) for the optimization of average and peak power consumption in the behavioral synthesis of ASICs. It considers lowering operating voltages, disabling the clock of components not in use, and architectural trade-offs, while also keeping silicon area at reasonable sizes. By attacking the power problem from the behavioral level, it can exploit an application's inherent parallelism to meet the desired performance and compensate for slower and less power-hungry operators.