Power Supplies

Dynamic power supply

Power gating adds enabling signals to a power supply network; dynamic power supply management adjusts supply voltage according to data path criticality. You are asked to take a testcase and upgrade its power supply network to dynamic power supply. How can you verify the power reduction of your technique?

Power Gating

Hierarchy and Power Gating

A scalable approach to chip architecture is essential and valuable since a SOC design today often becomes a component in an even larger chip in subsequent product generations. To support this portability, module boundaries must be enforced at the power domains level. That is, a given module should belong to a single power domain, not split across several domains. Some tools and flows support RTL process by RTL process assignment to power domains…

Retention

Retention mechanisms in power gated designs

How can we retain state of some of the registers in the design? How to deal with memory state? Let me try to explain each one of them based on my recent design experience. For regular logic blocks, there are multiple ways to wake-up faster without losing much of information. Use retention flops to save state of some important registers. For example state of control block, which forms the heart of the whole system. If the chip is aimed for At…