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Clock Gating

Dynamic power reduction by gating the clock
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Description

In most designs, data is loaded into registers very infrequently, but the clock signal continues to toggle at every clock cycle. Often, the clock signal drives a large capacitive load, making these signals a major source of dynamic power dissipation.
Clock gating reduces power dissipation for the following reasons:
• Power is not dissipated during the idle period when the register is shut-off by the gating function
• Power is saved in the gated-clock circuitry
• The logic on the enable circuitry in the original design is removed

Clock-Enabled Register Example

Consider a multiplexer (MUX) at the data input of a register. This MUX is controlled by an enable signal. The inferred logic block in the original RTL, before and after the clock-gating attribute is set is shown below.

Synthesis sees this type of description as a perfect candidate for clock gating. If the data input to a flip-flop can be reduced to a MUX between the data pin and the output pin of the flip-flop, the synthesis tool can model this flip-flop by connecting the “data input” directly to the data pin of the flip-flop, and by using the MUX enable to gate the clock signal of the flip-flop via an inserted clock-gating element as illustrated.

De-Cloning Local Clock Gating

If the clock-gating logic of different registers in the design uses the same enable signal, RTL Compiler can merge these clock-gating instances for any such identically gated registers. This process is called clock-gating de-cloning.

Page contents originally provided by Cadence Design Systems