Application-Driven Power Efficient ALU Design Methodology for Modern Microprocessors

Na Gong1,  Jinhui Wang2,  Ramalingam Sridhar1
1University at Buffalo, SUNY, 2VLSI and System Lab, Beijing University of Technology


Abstract

In this paper, we propose an application-driven ALU design methodology to achieve high level of power efficien-cy for modern microprocessors. We introduce a PN selection algorithm (PNSA) which enables designers to select power efficient dynamic modules for different applications, based on the detailed analysis of dynamic circuits. Experimental results on ISCAS85 and 74X-Series benchmark circuits show that the power consumption of 8-bit ALU based on this approach can be reduced by 54%-60% for different frequency levels as compared to the conventional dynamic ALU design, demonstrating the effectiveness of the pro-posed method on application-driven custom ALU design.