Title | ||
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Power and thermal effects of SRAM vs. Latch-Mux design styles and clock gating choices |
Abstract | ||
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This paper studies the impact on energy efficiency and thermal behavior of design style and clock-gating style in queue and array structures. These structures are major sources of power dissipation, and both design styles and various clock gating schemes can be found in modern, high-performance processors. Although some work in the circuits domain has explored these issues from a power perspective, thermal treatments are less common, and we are not aware of any work in the architecture domain.We study both SRAM and latch and multiplexer ("latch-mux") designs and their associated clock-gating options. Using circuit-level simulations of both design styles, we derive power-dissipation ratios which are then used in cycle-level power/performance/thermal simulations. We find that even though the "unconstrained" power of SRAM designs is always better than latch-mux designs, latch-mux designs dissipate less power in practice when a structure's average occupancy is low but access rate is high, especially when "stall gating" is used to minimize switching power. We also find that latch-mux designs with stall gating are especially promising from a thermal perspective, because they exhibit lower power density than SRAM designs. Overall, when combined with implementation and verification challenges for SRAMs, latch-mux designs with stall gating appear especially promising for designs with thermal constraints. This paper also shows the importance of considering the interaction between architectural and circuit-design choices when performing early-stage design exploration |
Year | DOI | Venue |
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2005 | 10.1145/1077603.1077647 | international symposium on low power electronics and design |
Keywords | DocType | ISBN |
cycle-level power,thermal behavior,sram design,power perspective,power dissipation,lower power density,latch-mux design,thermal effect,thermal perspective,thermal constraint,design style | Conference | 1-59593-137-6 |
Citations | PageRank | References |
2 | 0.37 | 9 |
Authors | ||
6 |
Name | Order | Citations | PageRank |
---|---|---|---|
Yingmin Li | 1 | 262 | 17.93 |
Mark Hempstead | 2 | 980 | 81.39 |
Patrick Mauro | 3 | 72 | 5.99 |
David Brooks | 4 | 5518 | 422.08 |
Zhigang Hu | 5 | 1004 | 71.46 |
Kevin Skadron | 6 | 6188 | 384.18 |