Low-Power EDA Technologies: State-of-the-Art and Beyond

Huge effort has been invested in the last decade to come up with a wide range of design solutions that help in facing the power consumption problem for different types of digital devices, components and systems. Some of such solutions turned out to be very effective in practice and suitable to be automated, thus finding a path into commercial EDA tools. Other approaches, promising on paper showed too many limitations for attracting the attention of real designers. Objective of this chapter is to provide the readers with an overview of state-of-the art EDA technologies, which allow designers to address the power problem in real-life electronic circuits and systems. The description of design methods, applicable at different levels of abstraction, that have proven to hold great potential for both dynamic and leakage power optimization in practical automatic design environments is complemented by the presentation of several results regarding the usage of the aforementioned design technologies in industrial designs covering different application domains