Bus optimization for low power in high-level synthesis

Abstract

Sub-micron feature sizes have resulted in a considerable portion of power to be dissipated on the buses, causing an increased attention on savings for power at the behavioral level and the RT level of design. This paper addresses the problem of minimizing power dissipated in the switching of the buses in the high-level synthesis of data-dominated behavioral descriptions. Unlike the previous approaches in which the minimization of the power consumed in buses has not been considered until operation scheduling is completed, our approach integrates the bus binding problem into scheduling to exploit the impact of scheduling on the reduction of power dissipated on the buses more fully and effectively. We accomplish this by formulating the problem into a flow problem in a network, and devising an efficient algorithm which iteratively finds the maximum flow of minimum cost solutions in the network. Experimental results on a number of benchmark problems show that given resource and global timing constraints our designs axe 19.8% power-efficient over the designs produced by a random-move based solution, and 15.5% power-efficient over the designs by a clock-step based optimal solution.