Developing a fast and inexpensive low power design strategy

A low power circuit design strategy is presented. We believe this methodology can be used to develop fast and inexpensive techniques to aid designers in power optimizations which are generally compute time hungry. The design strategy explored allows for fast sizing of the circuit to get to within 5% of an optimal operating point in terms of energy. Traditional optimization for energy uses time consuming, exhaustive simulations to determine the best possible operating point. The design rules being developed aim to predict the energy optimal point with accuracy but more importantly assist designers to arrive at a minimum energy solution quickly and explore design options better. Furthermore these rules can be used to develop optimization tools which are several orders of magnitude faster than current linear programming and convex optimization tools.