GasStation: Power and Area Efficient Buffering for Multiple Power Domain Design

Abstract

Power management, which can be effectively realized by dynamically turning on/off power domains, is a key concern for modern mobile devices. Leakage power in multiple power domain design is usually dominated by nets passing through different power domains because prior work allocates always-on buffers for these feedthrough nets. Unlike prior work, which uses always-on buffers, we create specific power islands with normal buffers in this paper; these power islands gather buffers on feedthrough nets together to share the power and area overhead. The buffer allocation is performed by a wave-propagation based algorithm, named GasStation. Compared with the conventional always-on buffer approach, experimental results show that GasStation can reduce 75% buffer area, 34% buffer count, 80% leakage power, and 8% wirelength on feedthrough nets in eight industrial smart phone designs.