Low power synthesis of dynamic logic circuits using fine-grained clock gating

Abstract Clock power consumes a significant fraction of total power dissipation in high speed precharge/evaluate logic styles. In this paper, we present a novel low-cost design methodology for reducing clock power in the active mode for dynamic circuits with fine-grained clock gating. The proposed technique also improves switching power by preventing redundant computations. A logic synthesis approach for domino/skewed logic styles based on Shannon expansion is proposed, that dynamically identifies idle parts of logic and applies clock gating to them to reduce power in the active mode of operation. Results on a set of MCNC benchmark circuits in predictive 70nm process exhibit improvements of 15 % to 64 % in total power with minimal overhead in terms of delay and area compared to conventionally synthesized domino/skewed logic. 1