Logic and Layout Aware Voltage Island Generation for Low Power Design

Multiple supply voltage (MSV) is one of the most effective schemes to achieve low power, but most works are based on logic level. A few recent works are based on physical level but all of them do not consider level converters which have an important effect in dual-vdd design. In this work we propose a logic and layout aware approach for voltage assignment and voltage island generation in placement process to minimize the number of level converters and to implement voltage islands with minimal overheads. Experimental results show that our approach uses much less level converters than the approach in (Bin Liu, 2006) (reduced by 59.50% on average) when achieving the same power savings. The approach is able to produce feasible placement with a small impact to traditional placement goals.