Noise-aware multiple-voltage assignment for gate-level power optimization

Given a circuit netlist, based on the slack analysis in the netlist, the optimal voltage in a maximum slack-sharing cluster(MSC) can be obtained to maintain the performance of the netlist. Furthermore, according to the optimal voltages of all the MSCs and the constraints for multiple-voltage assignment, an efficient assignment approach is proposed to assign multiple voltages onto the given circuit netlist for low-power optimization in this paper. The experimental results show that our proposed assignment approach has 10%~56% reduction of power consumption in multiple-voltage assignment for all the tested circuits.