Fine-grained power gating of datapath using FSM

As a fine-grained power gating method for achieving greater power savings, our approach takes advantage of the finite state machine with a datapath (FSMD) characteristic which shows sequential idleness among subcircuits. In an FSMD-based power gating, while only an active subcircuit is expected to be turned on, more subcircuits should be activated due to the power overhead. To reduce the number of missed opportunities for power savings, we deactivated some of the turned-on subcircuits by slowing the FSMD down and predicting its behavior. Our microprocessor experiments showed that the power savings are close to the upper bound.