Study On Timing Speculation Based Adaptive Voltage Scaling Techniqe

With the development of Integrated Circuit (IC) guided by Moore’s law and therule of device fabrication on size scaling down, the power density of chips becomeslarger and larger. In order to prevent the corresponding effects, researches on low powertechniques has increasingly become the hot spot. Adaptive Voltage Scaling (AVS) basedtechnique, Timing Speculation Adaptive Voltage Scaling (TSAVS), is an effective lowpower technique put forward in recent years. TSAVS inherits the major advantage ofAVS, namely, reducing system power consumption while not affecting the function andperformance of the system. While compared to AVS, TSAVS can save much moreenergy. The aim of this paper is to improve the TSAVS structure and mechanism forfurther power saving after verifying the effectiveness of TSAVS.At first, the concepts and principles of IC power consumption are introduced, andthe fact that major part of power consumption, dynamic power, is quadratically relatedto power supply voltage is pointed out. Then some popular low power techniques areintroduced. Among those techniques, Dynamic Power Management (DPM) reducespower consumption by turning off idle modules, which makes it the roughest technique.Dynamic Voltage Scaling (DVS) is more fine-grained than DPM, it regulates the supplyvoltage and frequency according to lookup table belongs to the open-loop regulation;AVS takes a further step, it regulates supply voltage in close-loop way by monitoringthe work load in real time. TSAVS in this paper can regulate supply voltage even lowerthan AVS by taking advantages of the characteristics of the pipeline structure ofmicroprocessor. This paper designs and tests the effectiveness of the TSAVS, usingtop-down methodology, in the0.13um CMOS process. This paper focuses on theTiming speculation mechanism of pipeline, analysis and design of the verificationsystem and an improved TSAVS structure and mechanism.This paper mainly analyses the pipeline and designs the timing speculation circuit,details the verification and gets a satisfied result. Finally, details of the improvedTSAVS structure is given as well as the simulation result which shows that compared with traditional TSAVS mechanism, it can result in33.5%saving of powerconsumption.