A novel low-power physical design methodology for MTCMOS

The optimization of virtual supply network plays an important role in MTCMOS low power design. Existing low power works are mainly on gate-level without any optimization on physical design level, which can lead to large amount of virtual supply networks. This paper presents (1) a low power driven physical design flow; (2) a novel low power placement to simultaneously place standard cells and sleep transistors and (3) sleep transistor relocation technique to further reduce the virtual supply networks. Experiment results are promising for both achieving up to 28.15% savings for virtual supply networks and well controlling the increase of signal nets