Integrated Architectural/Physical Planning Approach for Minimization of Current Surge in High Performance Clock-gated Microprocessors

We propose an integrated architectural/physical planning approach to reduce the power supply noise due to current surge in high performance, general-purpose, clock-gated microprocessors. The proposed approach combines dynamic selection of functional units on-the-fly, dynamic issue width scaling and physical planning with soft module, to balance the current demand across layout. Experimental results show that the proposed approach could reduce the peak noise by 6.54% and consequently, the decoupling capacitance requirement by 21.8%. The degradation in IPC (Instruction Per Cycle) due to the selection logic and issue width scaling is only 1.86e-7 (without increasing clock cycle period) in 0.18μm technology.