Multi-stage power gating based on controlling values of logic gates

As the CMOS technology scales down, low power technologies have been expected to reduce leakage power of the CMOS device. Controlling value based power gating is a fine-grained active mode power gating approach using the controlling values of logic elements. In this method, one input of a logic gate taking the controlling value stops the power supply to the logic blocks generating other inputs. In this paper, we propose a multi-stage power gating method based on controlling values by stopping the power supply of several gates in the power controlled blocks. Experimental results show that the proposed approach increases the number of power-off elements by 26.7% in average compared with the single-stage power-gating method.