Post sign-off leakage power optimization

With the scaling down of the CMOS technologies, leakage power is becoming an increasingly important issue in IC design. There is a trade-off between subthreshold leakage power consumption and clock frequency in the circuit; i.e., for higher performance, leakage power consumption must be sacrificed and vice versa. Meanwhile, timing analysis during synthesis and physical design is pessimistic, which means there are some slacks available to be traded for leakage power minimization. This power minimization can be done after the sign-off which is more accurate and realistic than if it is done before the sign-off. The available slack can be traded for leakage power minimization by footprint-based cell swapping and threshold voltage assignment. In this paper, we introduce our post sign-off leakage power optimization problem as a nonlinear mathematical program and solve it by using conjugate gradient (CG) method. We set up a novel transformation technique to manipulate the constraints of the optimization problem to be solved by CG. We show that by doing this optimization we can reduce the leakage power consumption by 34% on average in comparison with no power optimization after sign-off. All experiments are done on the real industrial designs.