Minimizing Leakage of Sequential Circuits through Flip-Flop Skewing and Technology Mapping

Leakage current of CMOS circuits has become a major factor in VLSI design these days. Although many circuit-level techniques have been developed, most of them require significant amount of designers' effort and are not aligned well with traditional VLSI design process. In this paper, we focus on technology mapping, which is one of the steps of logic synthesis when gates are selected from a particular library to implement a circuit. We take a radical approach to push the limit of technology mapping in its capability of suppressing leakage current: we use a probabilistic leakage (together with delay) as a cost function that drives the mapping; we consider pin reordering as one of options in the mapping; we increase the library size by employing gates with larger gate length; we employ a new flipflop that is specifically designed for low-leakage through selective increase of gate length. When all techniques are applied to several benchmark circuits, leakage saving of 46% on average is achieved with 45-nm predictive model, compared to the conventional technology mapping.