Novel SAT-based Invariant-Directed Low-Power Synthesis

Mahmoud Elbayoumi1,  Michael Hsiao1,  Mustafa Elnainay2
1Virginia Tech, 2Alexanderia University


Abstract

Dynamic power consumption is a critical concern in the design of both high performance and low-power circuits. Clock-gating is one of the most efficient and prominent approaches to reduce dynamic power. In this paper, (1) we propose the first scalable SAT-based approaches for Observability Don’t Care (ODC) clock gating; (2) we intelligently choose those inductive invariants candidates such that their validation will benefit the purpose in clock-gating-based low-power design. Our approach shows an average 23.2 % reduction dynamic power with an average 9.5% increase in area in optimized benchmarks.