Low power data format converter design using semi-static register allocation

Abstract

In many applications, such as digital signal processing, data format converters are used to reformat the data transferred between processing modules. In VLSI implementations, these converters consume a large portion of the available resources. Various methods have been proposed to synthesize data format converter architectures while optimizing the number of registers used to store the data. In this paper, we present a new register allocation scheme which not only minimizes the number of resistors, but also minimizes the power consumption in the data format converter. Low power data format converters are synthesized by minimizing the transitions and interconnections between the registers used to store the data. We present both a heuristic and an integer linear programming formulation to solve the allocation problem. Our method shows significant improvement over previous techniques.