Power optimization for the datapath of a 32-bit reconfigurable pipelined DSP processor

With the continuous increasing of circuit scale, the problem of power consumption is paid much more attention than before, especially in large designs. In this paper, an experience of optimizing the power consumption of the 16-bit datapath in a 32-bit reconflgurable pipelined Digital Signal Processor (DSP) is introduced. By keeping the old input values and preventing the useless switching of the logic blocks on the datapath, the power consumption is much lowered. At the same time, by relocating some logic blocks between different pipeline stages and employing some data forward logics, a better balanced pipeline is achieved to lower the power consumption for conditional computation instructions at very low timing and area costs. The effectivity of these power optimization technologies are proved by the experimental results. Finally, some ideas about how to reduce the power consumption of circuits are proposed, which are very effective and useful in practice designs, especially in pipelined ones.