Ultra-Low Power Pipeline Structure Exploiting Noncritical Stage with Circuit-Level Timing Speculation

With the increase of the clock frequency and silicon integration, power aware computing has become a critical concern in the design of the embedded processor and system-on-chip (SoC). Dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) is an effective method for low-power designs. However, traditional DVS methods have two deficiencies. First, they have a conservative safety margin which is not necessary for most of the time. Second, they are exclusively concerned with the critical stage and ignore the significant potential free slack time of the noncritical stage. These factors lead to a large amount of power waste. In this paper, a novel pipeline structure with ultra-low power consumption is proposed. It cuts off the safety margin and takes use of the noncritical stages at the same time. A prototype pipeline is designed in 0.13 m technology and analyzed. The result shows that a large amount of energy can be saved by using this structure. Compared with the fixed voltage case, 50% of the energy can be saved, and with respect to the traditional adaptive voltage scaling design, 37.8% of the energy can be saved.