Transforming Control-flow Intensive Designs to Facilitate Power Management

We present techniques to transform scheduled descriptions of control-flow intensive (CFI) designs to facilitate power manage-ment. We investigate the factors that inhibit the application of power management in synthesized register-transfer level (RTL) implemen-tations. Based on these insights, we present transformation tech-niques based on the concepts of variable protection, variable re-naming and re-assignment, and limited controller state memory in-sertion that result in inherently power-managed architectures. Our transformation techniques can be easily used in conjunction with any existing resource sharing algorithm or in the framework of exist-ing high-level synthesis tools. Experimental results on CFI designs indicate reductions of up to 76.6 % (35.6 % on average) in power consumption at area overheads not exceeding 10.1 % (1.1 % on av-erage) over already power-optimized designs.