AN OPTIMIZATION-BASED MULTIPLE-VOLTAGE SCALING TECHNIQUE FOR LOW-POWER CMOS DIGITAL DESIGN

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a voltage scaling technique with multiple supply voltages for low-power designs. We adopt the path sensitization technique and release the clustering constraint used by the previous works. Our technique first operates the gates with the lowest feasible supply voltages and then uses an existing path selection algorithm for optimization. Experiments are conducted on all ISCAS85 benchmarks and the results show that significant power can be further reduced by our technique in comparison with the previous works. Furthermore, the results generated by our technique are close to the optimal values.