Dynamic Active-bit Detection and Operands Exchange for Designing Energy-aware Asynchronous Multipliers

摘要

Energy-awareness indicates the scalability of the system energy with changing conditions and quality requirements. Because of the encoding format and operation sequence, dual-rail asynchronous circuits do not naturally energy aware to the changing of input precision. Although novel techniques like Zero Insertion are demonstrated very effective in designing energy-aware dual-rail asynchronous circuits, they need central control units to detect the current input precision and set up control signal. This is inefficient if the precision of input data changes frequently. This paper proposes a dynamic active-bit detection scheme to detect the current input precision and set up control automatically for circuit blocks like multipliers implementing Zero Insertion. To further improve the energy saving, an operands exchange scheme is presented. By implementing these two techniques, the designer is able to choose between energy efficiency and area overhead, thus achieving the best energy awareness.