Power minimization in IC design

Abstract

Low power has emerged as a principal theme in today's electronics industry. The need for low power has caused a major paradigm shift in which power dissipation is as important as performance and area. This article presents an in-depth survey of CAD methodologies and techniques for designing low power digital CMOS circuits and systems and describes the many issues facing designers at architectural, logical, and physical levels of design abstraction. It reviews some of the techniques and tools that have been proposed to overcome these difficulties and outlines the future challenges that must be met to design low power, high performance systems.