A rule-based approach for minimizing power dissipation of digital circuits

Minimization of power dissipation of VLSI circuits is one of the major concerns of recent digital circuit design primarily due to the ever decreasing feature sizes of circuits, higher clock frequencies and larger die sizes. The primary contributors to power dissipation in digital circuits include leakage power, short-circuit power and switching power. Of these, power dissipation due to the circuit switching activity constitutes the major component. As such, an effective mechanism to minimize the power loss in such cases often involves the minimization of the switching activity. In this paper, we propose an intelligent rule-based algorithm for reducing the switching activity of the digital circuits at logic optimization stage. The proposed algorithm is empirically tested for several standard digital circuits with Synopsys EDA tool and the results obtained are quite encouraging.