Interconnect driven low power high-level synthesis

This work is a contribution to high level synthesis for low power systems. While device feature size decreases, interconnect power becomes a dominating factor. Thus it is important that accurate physical information is used during high-level synthesis [1]. We propose a new power optimisation algorithm for RT-level netlists. The optimisation performs simultaneously slicing-tree structure-based floorplanning and functional unit binding and allocation. Since floorplanning, binding and allocation can use the information generated by the other step, the algorithm can greatly optimise the interconnect power. Compared to interconnect unaware power optimised circuits, it shows that interconnect power can be reduced by an average of 42.7%, while reducing overall power by 21.7% on an average. The functional unit power remains nearly unchanged. These optimisations are not achieved at the expense of area.