Integrating operation scheduling and binding for functional unit power-gating in high-level synthesis

Power-gating-aware design has been an active area of research in the last decade, aiming at reducing power dissipation while meeting a desired system throughput. In this study, an algorithm integrating both scheduling and binding processes is developed with the functional unit (FU) power-gating technique, to achieve maximum leakage energy reduction under both performance and resource constraints. Firstly, the possible leakage energy reductions of all idle intervals are analyzed by evaluating the operation mobilities. Secondly, a min-cost flow-based algorithm is conducted to evaluate the total leakage energy saving from power-gating FUs, and operations are scheduled to the clock cycles with maximization of the leakage energy saving. Finally, all operations are bound to FUs following the min-cost flow solution of the network derived from the final scheduling result. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our algorithm in leakage energy reduction.