Low Power Physical Design And Verification Of Graphics Processor Compute Unit

With the popularity of mobile devices and the development of computer graphics.Graphics processors have been widely used in various fields.Whether it is commercial office or ordinary home system computer,or game enthusiasts getting higher and higher demands on graphics processor performance.In the face of the current nanometer process the chip's high energy consumption has become a bottleneck to improvement the performance of the system.To find new low power technologies and rationally plan low-power methods become the main way to achieve high performance and low power designs.This paper analyzes the power component and factors of CMOS digital integrated circuits.Then mainly explores several key low power methods in the physical design stage and applied to the physical design of the graphics processor compute unit.Firstly,the paper analyzes the system structure of the graphics processor compute unit.According to the initial power consumption distribution and front-end specification for different work scenarios under the load scheduling operation requirements.Controlling the number of processor modules to switch off in time to make the graphics processor compute unit work in three different modes.Additional,provide different power supplies to the Cache module and other modules.Based on these to identify the appropriate low power schemes.Then,according to the low-power scheme to adopt the unified power format(UPF)to work out overall power intent.This UPF will be as the guide to complete low-power logic synthesis.The optimal netlist is obtained after several feedbacks and iterations between synthesis and physical planning.It will service as the inputs data for low-power physical to accomplish power gating,clock gating and multi-voltages technology implementation.Eventually to finish static verification,low power check and static timing analysis on the low power implementation.Finally,to do power analysis and comparison of traditional physical design and low power design.The low-power implementation based on Global Foundries 14nm process and contains 1.6 million instances.Area is 1300*1500um2.The highest mode frequency is 1661.1MHz in typical operation condition.The traditional physical design total power consumption is 585.5mW.The total power consumption of the low-power design after using the multiple low-power methods is 324.9 mW.The overall power consumption is reduced by 44.5%.Thus,the low power consumption strategy made the graphics processor compute unit to reduce the total power consumption significantly without impact the system performance.