Reducing and smoothing power consumption of ROM-based controller implementations
Bertrand Le Gal, Aurélien Ribon, Lilian Bossuet, Dominique Dallet · 2010
Interest in automated methodologies increased last decades due to the ever-growing processing complexity and time-to-market constraints. CAD tools prove their efficiency in power consumption management, which is nowadays a major constraint for embedded systems. Efficient low power techniques for Finite State Machine (FSM) design have been proposed for logic-based controllers. In this paper, we explore the circuit power consumption reduction when the FSM is mapped in ROM blocks. The described methodology achieves power reduction of ROM-based controllers through the transformation of don't care values in the decoder part of the design. This methodology allows a reduction of the number of resource commutations and smoothes them over the processing execution, limiting current spikes. Experiments show that the number of commutation can be decreased from 64% compared to an area-optimized ROM implementation.