Coarse grain clock gating of streaming applications in programmable logic implementations

Streaming applications describe a broad class of computing algorithms in areas such as signal processing, media coding and compression, cryptography, video analytics, network touting and packet processing and many others. For many of these applications, programmable logic devices such as FP-GAs are the implementation platform of choice due to their higher flexibility compared to ASICs and lower power consumption and higher performance compared to processors. This paper presents a set of techniques for taking advantage of the streaming character of the algorithm by selectively switching off parts of the circuit that cannot execute, thus saving power. The implementation is integrated into an existing high-level synthesis flow, and applied to a variety of appli-cations, resulting in up to 20% power reduction with a very small additional logic footprint and no loss in throughput. © 2014 European Electronic Chips & Systems design ECSI.