Processor Description Languages

5.4 Processor Verification 113

■ Clock gating: To reduce the dynamic power of a processor, it is important

to gate the storage elements when no new data is being read. Due to its

overwhelming effect on overall power consumption, commercial gate-level

synthesis tools are currently supporting automatic clock gating. However, to

determine the gating signal, that is, the signal to indicate when a new data is

not available, is an important research problem. In the perspective of LISA, it

is identified by tracing the register write operations to LISA operations [17].

The clock gating for registers as well as pipeline registers is performed by

inserting dedicated ...