Multi-Dimensional Circuit and Micro-Architecture Level Optimization

This paper studies multi-dimensional optimization at both circuit and micro-architecture levels. By formulating and solving the optimization problem with conflicting design objectives and multiple tunable knobs, it is revealed that the ´sensitivity balance´ strategy proposed in recent works for performance-energy optimization is a special case of a general multi-dimensional optimization framework. The results derived in this paper help the understanding of efficient trade-off among multiple design objectives with multiple knobs. The example of an industrial control logic implemented in PLA shows 22% energy saving and 70% area reduction at the expense of 4% delay increase