Low Power Digital IC Design

Introduction
Power is the rate at which energy is delivered or exchanged. Unit is Watts (Joules/second)
Power Analysis and Optimization

There are two main aspects to low power digital IC design: Analysis and Optimization

Analysis deals with the accurate estimation of power dissipation or energy consumption
at various phases within the digital design flow. One of the main goals of analysis is to
make sure that the power specifications are not violated and to increase the confidence of
the design working properly

In early stages of the design flow, less design details are available. So the analysis of
power dissipation tends to be fast bus less accurate. As you go down the design flow,
more details become available. In these stages, analysis often becomes detailed and timeconsuming

Analysis also provides information that can be used in the optimization of power
dissipation.

Optimization deals with achieving the best balance of speed, power dissipation and
reliability of operation (Reducing just the power dissipation is not always the sole aim)

In other words, low-power digital IC design often involves trade-offs

Examples:

For a given speed and area requirement, how can we achieve the lowest
power dissipation while maintaining accuracy and reliability?

For a given power budget, how can the speed performance be maximized
without increasing the area and without compromising functionality?

Power, analysis and optimization and low-power design of digital ICs were not
considered mainstream until about the mid to late 1990s.

Nowadays, lowering of power dissipation is one of the most important concerns in the
digital design flow.

P.S. Nair

Need for Low Power (Importance of Low Power)

Inside the chip:

Transistor and Integrated Circuit (IC) technology has progressed rapidly since the advent
of Moores law. We are now at a point where it is possible to pack billions of transistors
in a single IC chip (The Intel Xeon Phi has about 5 billion (5,000,000,000) transistors
and 62 cores. Compare this with Intels first microprocessor, the 4004, which had 2300
transistors. The progress made in IC technology is indeed mind-boggling!). Smaller
transistor sizes and better IC manufacturing technology have contributed to this. The
actual physical dimensions of the IC chip do not change much. This means very high
densities of fast-switching transistors. The power dissipated by these transistors is
localized within the small area of the IC. This leads to high heat-densities and
temperatures. If the heat in the chip is not removed, the chip will fail. The cooling costs
can be brought down only with low-power design. Otherwise, the cooling costs will
become prohibitively expensive (think water-cooled, chips with special coolants).

Outside the chip:

Low power design is also necessitated by the increasing cost of data centers and server
farms.
The cost of running huge data centers (most data centers are located near a water
source) is determined just by the monthly power bill of the data center, not anything else.
One server rack in a server farm can consume up to 20 kW
A 100-rack server will, therefore, dissipate 20,000 x 100 = 2MW (that is a lot of heat and
requires complicated air-conditioning and thermal modeling!)

There is an increased market-demand for portable battery-operated products. Examples

include smartphones, tablets, laptops. People want smaller, lighter, faster products with
long battery lives. This has also served as a driver for low-power design. Battery energy
density has not improved at a pace that is fast enough to meet the power demand of such
products. Lithium ion batteries were the last big improvement in battery technology. Fuel
cell technology provided some hope in this direction but this technology has not really
taken off

Recent times have also witnessed the advent of power-scavenging hardware applications
with small physical dimensions. These applications must have extremely low power in
order to be viable and effective
There is also a need for low-power design from an environmental perspective. More and
more battery chargers (for cellphones, tablets etc.) that are connected to wall outlets
means that more power is drawn from the electricity grid. Low-power design helps in
decreasing the load on the grid, thus saving electricity. Less electricity production means
less pollution at power generation plants. Energy Star program (by EPA and US Dept. of

P.S. Nair

Energy) provides guidelines for energy usage by computing equipment (EPA stands for
the US Environmental Protection Agency)

Question: Is Low-Power Design just concerned with achieving low-energy operation?

No! The emphasis is on optimizing power dissipation in the energy-delay-area tradeoff space.
The goal is to get the most suitable balance of these conflicting design constraints.

P.S. Nair