Abstract
With the advent of portable electronic systems, power consumption has recently become a major issue in circuit and system design. Furthermore, the sophisticated fabrication technology makes it possible to embed more functions and features in a VLSI chip, consequently calling for both higher performance and lower power to deal with the ever growing complexity of system algorithms than in the past. VLSI designers should cope with two conflicting constraints, high performance and low power, offering an optimum trade off of these constraints to meet requirements of system. Historically, VLSI designers have focused on performance improvement, and power dissipation was not a design criteria but an afterthought. This design paradigm should be changed, as power is emerging as the most critical design constraint. In VLSI design, low power design can be accomplished through many ways, for instance, process, circuit/logic design, architectural design, and etc.. In this paper, a few low power design examples, which have been used in 8 bit micro-controller core, and can be used also in 4/16/32 bit micro-controller cores, are presented in the areas of circuit, logic and architectural design. We first propose a low power guidelines for micro-controller design in SAMSUNG, and more detailed design examples are followed applying 4 specific design guidelines. The 1st example shows the power reduction through reduction of number of state clocks per instruction. The 2nd example realized the power reduction by applying RISC(Reduced Instruction Set Computer) concept. The 3rd example is to optimize the algorithm for ALU(Arithmetic Logic Unit) to lower the power consumption, Lastly, circuit cells designed for low power are described.