Adaptive Clock Gating Technique for Low Power IP Core in SoC Design

Clock gating is a well-known technique to reduce chip dynamic power. This paper analyzes the disadvantages of some recent clock gating techniques and points out that they are difficult in system-on-chip (SoC) design. Based on the analysis of the intellectual property (IP) core model, an adaptive clock gating (ACG) technique which can be easily realized is introduced for the low power IP core design. ACG can automatically enable or disable the IP clock to reduce not only dynamic power but also leakage power with power gating technique. The experimental results on some IP cores in a real SoC show an average of 62.2% dynamic power reduction and 70.9% leakage power reduction without virtually performance impact.