Exploiting temporal idleness to reduce leakage power in programmable architectures

One of the biggest challenges that programmable devices like FPGAs are facing in ultra deep sub-micron regime is the exponential rise in leakage power consumption. As technology shrinks below 90nm, a new design paradigm has to evolve to tackle the issue of leakage power consumption. In this work we focus on a new design methodology for reducing leakage power by exploiting temporal locality in designs and accordingly group them into clusters that can be switched on and off. We propose a power state controller based method, which controls the switching of the clusters from one state to another. We show our technique using data flow graphs where temporal locality can be effectively explored. Our results show that substantial leakage savings can be achieved if temporal idleness of designs can be exploited effectively.