Power optimization reduces power consumption in digital devices by balancing size, performance, and heat dissipation. It’s critical for portable devices and achieved through limiting energy waste and selecting low-energy components. Other approaches include clock gating, sleep modes, and better logic design.
Power optimization is the attempt to reduce the power consumed by digital devices such as integrated circuits by balancing parameters such as size, performance and heat dissipation. It is a very critical area of electronic component design because many portable electronic devices require high processing capacity with low power consumption. Components must perform complex functions but generate as little heat and noise as possible, all packed into a very small surface area. Power optimization is a research intensive area of digital design, vital to the commercial success of many devices.
The idea of optimizing power in electronic design began to gain attention in the late 1980s with the widespread use of portable devices. Battery life, heating effects and cooling requirements have become very important for both environmental and economic reasons. Fitting increasingly complex components onto smaller chip sizes has become critical to ensuring the production of smaller devices with more functionality. The heat generated by including so many components, however, has become a major problem. Factors such as device performance and reliability are also affected by heat.
To downsize chips, reduce die size and still have peak performance at acceptable temperature levels, time must be invested in power optimization methodologies. Manual power tuning becomes impossible with existing chips like integrated circuits because they contain millions of components. Typically, designers achieve power optimization by limiting energy waste, which is mainly speculation, architecture, and program waste. All of these methods seek to reduce energy waste from the circuit design level to execution and application.
Program wasting occurs when a high-end microprocessor executes commands that are not needed. Running these commands does not change the contents of memory and registers. Eliminating program waste means reducing dead instruction execution and eliminating silent shops. Speculation waste occurs when the processor fetches and executes instructions beyond unresolved branches. Architectural waste occurs when structures such as caches, branch predictors, and instruction queues are too large or too small.
Mostly designed to hold large quantities, architectural structures are usually not used to their full capacity. Conversely, making them smaller also increases the power consumption due to more speculation. Successful power optimization requires using a system level approach by selecting components that consume very little energy. All possible combinations of these component types can be explored at the design stage. Reducing the amount of switching activity needed in the circuit also results in lower power consumption.
Some of the other approaches used for power optimization include clock gating, sleep modes, and better logic design. Retiming, path balancing, and state encoding are other logical methods that can limit power consumption. Some microprocessor designers also use special formats to encode design files that insert power-saving control functions.
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