Bipartition and synthesis in low power pipelined circuits

By treating each different output pattern as a state, we propose a low power architecture for pipelined circuits using bipartition. It is possible that the output of a pipelined circuit transit mainly among some of different stares. If some few stales dominate most of the time, we could partition the combinational portion of a pipelined circuit into two blocks: one that contains the few states with high activity is small and the other that contains the remainder with low activity is big. The original pipelined circuit is bipartitioned into two individual pipelined circuits. An additional combination logic block is introduced to control which of the two partitioned blocks to work. Power reduction is based on the observation that most time the small block is at work and the big one is at idle. In order to minimize the power consumption of this architecture, we present an algorithm that can improve the efficiency of this additional control block. Experiments with MCNC benchmarks show high percentage of power saving by using our new architecture for low power pipelined circuit design.