• ETRI Journal
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• v.33 no.3
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• pp.466-469
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• 2011

As a fine-grained power gating method for achieving greater power savings, our approach takes advantage of the finite state machine with a datapath (FSMD) characteristic which shows sequential idleness among subcircuits. In an FSMD-based power gating, while only an active subcircuit is expected to be turned on, more subcircuits should be activated due to the power overhead. To reduce the number of missed opportunities for power savings, we deactivated some of the turned-on subcircuits by slowing the FSMD down and predicting its behavior. Our microprocessor experiments showed that the power savings are close to the upper bound.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.45 no.2
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• pp.82-92
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• 2008

Recently, many digital signal processing(DSP) applications such as H.264, CDMA and MP3 are predominant tasks for modern high-performance portable devices. These applications are generally computation-intensive, and therefore, require quite complicated accelerator units to improve performance. Designing such specialized, yet fixed DSP accelerators takes lots of effort. Therefore, DSPs with multiple accelerators often have a very poor time-to-market and an unacceptable area overhead. To avoid such long time-to-market and high-area overhead, dynamically reconfigurable DSP architectures have attracted a lot of attention lately. Dynamically reconfigurable DSPs typically employ a multi-functional DSP accelerator which executes similar, yet different multiple kinds of computations for DSP applications. With this type of dynamically reconfigurable DSP accelerators, the time to market reduces significantly. However, integrating multiple functionalities into a single IP often results in excessive control and area overhead. Therefore, delay and power consumption often turn out to be quite excessive. In this thesis, to reduce power consumption of dynamically reconfigurable IPs, we propose a novel fine-grained clock gating scheme, and to reduce size of dynamically reconfigurable IPs, we propose a compact multiplier-less multiplication unit where shifters and adders carry out constant multiplications.