Efficient Method of Power Management on System on Chip Communication Using Steiner Graph

Abstract

Power consumption become the major factors limiting the speed of very-large-scale integration (VLSI) circuits, while interconnect is becoming a primary power consumer. These factors bring new demands on the communication architecture of system-on-chips (SoCs). Current bus architectures such as AMBA, Core connect, and Avalon are convenient for designers but not efficient on power. This paper proposes a physical synthesis scheme for on-chip buses and bus matrices to minimize the power consumption, without changing the interface or arbitration protocols. By using a bus gating technique, data transactions can take shortest paths on chip, reducing the power consumption of bus wires to minimal. Experiments indicate that the gated bus from our synthesis flow can save more than 91% dynamic power on average data transactions in current AMBA bus systems, which is about 5–12% of total SoC power consumption, based on comparable amount of chip area and routing resources.