Automatic design of low-power encoders using reversible circuit synthesis
Robert Wille, Rolf Drechsler, Christof Osewold, Alberto García-Ortiz · Design, Automation, and Test in Europe · 2012
The application of coding strategies is an established methodology to improve the characteristics of on-chip interconnect architectures. Therefore, design methods are required which realize the corresponding encoders and decoders with as small as possible overhead in terms of power and delay. In the past, conventional design methods have been applied for this purpose.This work proposes an entirely new direction which exploits design methods for reversible circuits. Here, much progress has been made in the last years. The resulting reversible circuits represent one-to-one mappings which can inherently work as logical descriptions for the desired encoders and decoders. Both, an exact and a heuristic synthesis approach, are introduced which rely on reversible design principles but also incorporate objectives from on-chip interconnect architectures.Experiments show that significant improvements with respect to power consumption, area, and delay can be achieved using the proposed direction.