PowerAdviser: an RTL power platform for interactive sequential optimizations

Power has become the overriding concern for most modern electronic applications today. To reduce clock power, sequential clock gating is increasingly getting used over and above combinational clock gating. Given the complexity of manually identifying sequential clock gating changes, automatic tools are becoming popular. However, since these tools always work within the scope of the design and the constraints provided, they do not provide any insight into additional power savings that might still be possible. In this paper we present an interactive sequential analysis flow, PowerAdviser, which besides performing automatic sequential changes also provides information for additional power savings that the user can realize through manual changes. Using this new flow we have achieved dynamic power reduction upto 45% more than a purely automated flow.