Low-power resource binding by postsilicon customization

Abstract

This article proposes the first postsilicon customization method for resource binding to achieve power reduction application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) design. Instead of committing to one configuration of resource binding during synthesis, our new synthesis method produces a diverse set of candidate bindings for the design. To ensure diversity of the resource usage patterns, we introduce a binding candidate formation method based on the orthogonal arrays. Additional control components are added to enable post manufacturing selection of one of the binding candidates. The resource binding candidate that minimizes the power consumption is selected by considering the specific power characteristics of each chip. An efficient methodology for embedding several binding candidates in one design is developed. Evaluations on benchmark designs show the low overhead and the effectiveness of the proposed methods. As an example, applying our method results in an average of 14.2% (up to 24.0%) power savings on benchmark circuits for a variation model in 45nm CMOS technology. The power efficiency of our customized postsilicon binding is expected to improve with scaling of the technology and the likely resulting higher process variations.