A novel low-cost dynamic logic reconfigurable structure strategy for low power optimization

Low power design techniques have been extensively applied in modern IC designs to avoid negative side effects from high power density. Unlike Dynamic Voltage and/or Frequency Scaling (DVFS) approaches only applied on a fixed design, we propose a dynamic logic reconfigurable structure strategy which allows dynamic switching from a high speed/power logic structure to a low speed/power logic structure. A design with such configurable structure is called Dynamic Logic Reconfigurable Structure (DLRS). Different from approximate computing which trades off between computation accuracy and power, our DLRS designs maintain data integrity. In this paper, we propose novel low-cost DLRS adders and multipliers, and a comprehensive framework for low power designs. We further integrate DLRS with DVFS, which creates more flexibility to trade-off between performance and power consumption. Experimental results show that with DLRS adders and multipliers in three indoor designs, the proposed method can achieve up to 60.05% power reduction compared with traditional DVFS scheme with only 6.55% area overhead.