Vishwani D. Agrawal Technical Staff Bell Labs, Murray Hill, NJ

Digital Circuit Design for Minimum Transient Energy

We provide a theoretical basis for reducing or completely eliminating the energy consumption due to transients in a synchronous digital circuit. The transient energy is minimized when every gate has no more than one output transition per clock cycle. This condition is achieved for a gate when the gate delay equals or exceeds the maximum difference between path delays at gate inputs. In practice, path delays are adjusted either by increasing gate delays or by inserting delay buffers. The minimum transient energy design is obtained when no delay buffer is added. This design requires possible increases in gate delays to meet the minimum energy condition at all gates. However, the delay of the critical path may be increased. In an alternative design, where the critical path delay is not allowed to increase, delay buffers may have to be added. A linear program makes trade-offs between minimum transient energy and critical path delay. In an extreme design where the delay of the circuit increases three times, an optimized four-bit ALU circuit consumes 53% peak and 73% average power in comparison to the un-optimized circuit, as determined by Spice simulation. This work was done in collaboration with M. L. Bushnell of Rutgers University, G. Parthasarathy (UC, Santa Barbara) and R. Ramadoss (Lucent).

Bio
Dr. Vishwani D. Agrawal is a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs, Murray Hill, New Jersey, USA, and a Visiting Professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA. He received a BSc degree from Allahabad University, Allahabad, India, in 1960, BE degree from University of Roorkee, Roorkee, India, in 1964, ME degree from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India, in 1966, and a Ph.D. degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1971. In 1986, he was elected an IEEE Fellow for his contributions to "probabilistic testing of integrated circuits." In 1993, University of Illinois honored him with their Distinguished Alumnus Award. In 1998, he received the Harry H. Goode Award of the IEEE Computer Society for "innovative contributions to the field of electronic testing." He has published 250 papers and five books, and has received five best paper awards. He holds thirteen U.S. patents. He has co-directed 12 Ph.D. theses at major universities. In 1991 he co-founded the International Conference on VLSI Design.