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The increasing power consumption levels of integrated circuits (ICs) have become a major concern of the semiconductor industry. Excessive power dissipation causes overheating, which can lead to soft errors or permanent damage. It also limits battery life in portable equipment. High power consumption can be reduced by properly increasing area. However, arbitrarily large area, namely high number of functional units (FU) in high-level view, dramatically increases IC cost. This paper describes a new dynamic-power aware High Level Synthesis data path approach that considers dynamic FU allocation while attempting to minimize area, power, or make a trade-off between them. The experimental results have shown that when the area is nearly the same, our approach delivers a 5.99% reduction in power consumption. And when the power consumption is nearly the same, a 11.81% reduction in total FU area occurs. And we can obtain different optimal power-area trade-off values by adjusting power and area ratios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Power consumption of multimedia applications executing on embedded cores is heavily dependent on data transfers between system memory and processing units. The purpose of this paper is to extend an existing power optimizing methodology based on data-reuse decisions, in order to determine the optimal solution in a rapid and reliable way. An analytical approach is proposed by extracting expressions for the number of accesses to each memory layer. Moreover, the design space is further reduced since these analytical expressions are calculated only for a subset of all transformations. The results concerning the power efficiency of data-reuse transformations are in agreement to those in previous studies. However, the exploration time of the design space is significantly reduced. The proposed methodology is also applied to the case of multiple parallel processing cores, proving that the relative effect of each transformation is independent on the number of processors and the applied memory architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]