Timing driven power gating

Abstract

Power Gating is effective for reducing leakage power. Previously, a Distributed Sleep Transistor Network (DSTN) was proposed to reduce the sleep transistor area by connecting all the virtual ground lines together to minimize the Maximum Instantaneous Current (MIC) through sleep transistors. In this paper, we propose a new methodology for determining the size of sleep transistors for the DSTN structure. We present novel algorithms and theorems for efficiently estimating a tight upper bound of the voltage drop. We also present efficient heurists for minimizing the sizes of sleep transistors. Our experimental results are very exciting.