Functional unit duplication for reducing dynamic power

Abstract

Nowadays, power savings when designing a circuit become more important than area cost. Through duplicating a Functional Unit (FU)instead of sharing it, designers can archive more power efficient circuits. To prove the advantage of the FU duplication, we compared the power consumptions of circuits with shared FU and duplicated FUs. Experimental results on ISCAS '85 benchmarks showed great savings in dynamic power of interconnection circuits and fan-out buffers. The circuits with duplicated FUs consumed less power than the shared FU by average 28.4%.