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In this paper, we propose a voltage scaling technique with multiple supply voltages for low-power designs. We adopt the path sensitization technique and release the clustering constraint used by the previous works. Our technique first operates the gates with the lowest feasible supply voltages and then uses an existing path selection algorithm for optimization. Experiments are conducted on all ISCAS85 benchmarks and the results show that significant power can be further reduced by our technique in comparison with the previous works. Furthermore, the results generated by our technique are close to the optimal values.

It has been estimated that multiplexors (MUXes) make up a major portion of the circuitry in a typical chip. Therefore, to reduce power consumption of a chip, it is important to consider the design of MUXes that consumes less power. This is called the low power MUX decomposition problem and has been studied in Ref. 1. This paper improves on the results of Ref. 1 in two ways: (a) we propose a method to speed up the algorithms in Ref. 1, and (b) we propose a post-optimization procedure to further reduce the overall power dissipation of decompositions obtained by any MUX decomposition algorithm. Using this post-optimization procedure, we have been able to further reduce the power dissipation results of Ref. 1.

Due to the regularity of implementation, multiplexers are widely used in VLSI circuit synthesis. This paper proposes a technique for decomposing a function into 2-to-1 multiplexers performing area-power tradeoff. To the best of our knowledge this is the first ever effort to incorporate leakage into power calculation for multiplexer-based decomposition. With respect to an initial ROBDD (reduced ordered binary decision diagram)-based representation of the function, the scheme shows more than 30% reduction in area, leakage and switching for the LGSynth91 benchmarks without performance degradation. It also enumerates the trade-offs present in the solution space for different weights associated with these three quantities.