Evaluating the impact of max transition constraint variations on power reduction capabilities in cell-based designs

Power optimization is a very important and challenging step in the physical design flow, and it is a critical success factor of an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) chip. Many techniques are used by the place and route (P&R) electronic design automation (EDA) tools to meet the power requirement. In this paper, we will evaluate, independently from the library file, the impact of redefining the max transition constraint (MTC) before the power optimization phase, and we will study the impact of over-constraining or under-constraining a design on power in order to find the best trade-off between design constraining and power optimization. Experimental results showed that power optimization depends on the applied MTC and that the MTC value corresponding to the best power reduction results is different from the default MTC. By using a new MTC definition method on several designs, we found that the power gain between the default methodology and the new one reaches 2.34%. © 2017 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.