A New Methodology for Power-Aware Transistor Sizing: Free Power Recovery (FPR)

In this paper, the authors present a new transistor sizing methodology called Free Power Recovery (FPR) for low power circuit design. The objective of this methodology is to minimize the total power of a circuit by accounting for node switching activities and Leakage Duty Cycles (LDCs). The methodology has been incorporated into the EinsTuner circuit tuning tool. EinsTuner automates the tuning process using state-of-the-art non-linear optimization solvers and fast circuit simulators. Node switching activities and LDC are integrated into the EinsTuner framework as parameter inputs to the FPR tuning mode.