Estimation of power dissipation in CMOS combinational circuits using Boolean function manipulation

It is shown that a simplified model of power dissipation relates maximizing dissipation to maximizing gate output activity, appropriately weighted to account for differing load capacitances. To find the input or input sequence that minimizes the weighted activity, algorithms are given for transforming the problem to a weighted max-satisfiability problem, and exact and approximate algorithms for solving weighted max-satisfiability are presented. Algorithms for constructing the max-satisfiability problem for both dynamic and static CMOS, where for the latter dissipation caused by glitching is considered, are presented. The authors present efficient exact and approximate methods for solving weighted max-satisfiability and show that these methods are viable for large-scale problems through examination of experimental results