A novel technique to create energy-efficient contexts for reconfigurable logic

High power consumption is a constraining factor for the growth of programmable logic devices. We propose two techniques in order to reduce power consumption. The first is a technique for creating contexts. This technique uses data-dependent circuits and wire sharing between contexts. The second is a technique for switching the contexts. In this paper, we evaluate the capability of the two techniques to reduce power consumption using a multi-context logic device. As a result, as compared with the original circuit, our multi-context circuits can reduce the power consumption by 9.1% on an average and by a maximum of 19.0%. Furthermore, applying our resource sharing technique to these circuits, we achieved a reduction of 10.6% on an average and a maximum reduction of 18.8%.