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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]

Computer-aided design (CAD) tools are frequently employed to verify the design objectives before the fabrication of an integrated circuit. An important circuit parameter that requires accurate characterization is the power consumption due to the strict constraints on the acceptable power envelope of integrated systems. Circuit simulators typically provide built-in functions to measure the power consumption. However, the accuracy of the measured power is mostly overlooked since the approximations and the methodologies used by the existing built-in power estimation tools are not well documented. The research community tends to assume that the built-in functions provide accurate power figures. This blind-trust in the CAD tools, however, may lead to gross errors in power estimation. A generic methodology to accurately measure the power and energy consumption with the circuit simulators is described in this paper. An equation to calculate the device power consumption based on the different current conduction paths in a MOSFET is presented. An expression for the total power consumption of a complex circuit is derived by explicitly considering the different circuit terminals including the inputs, the outputs, and the body-contacts. Results indicate that the power measurements with the built-in functions of widely used commercial circuit simulators can introduce significant errors in a 65 nm CMOS technology. For deeply scaled nano-CMOS circuits, a conscious power and energy measurement with the proposed explicit methodology is recommended for an accurate pre-fabrication circuit characterization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]