Flip-flop State Driven Clock Gating: Concept, Design, and Methodology

Abstract

Flip-flop's input data toggling based clock gating is one of the most widely used clock gating methods, in which one critical and inherent limitation is the sharp increase of gating logic as more flip-flops are gating. In this work, we propose a new clock gating method to overcome this limitation. Precisely, (1) we analyze the resources of gating logic in the input data toggling based clock gating, from which an ineffectiveness in resource utilization is observed and we propose a new clock gating technique called flip-flop state driven clock gating which completely eliminates the essential and expensive component of XOR gates for detecting input toggling of flip-flops; (2) we provide the supporting logic circuitry of our proposed XOR-free clock gating, confirming its safe applicability through a comprehensive timing analysis; (3) we propose, based on the flip-flops' state profile, a clock gating methodology that seamlessly combines our flip-flop state based clock gating with the toggling based clock gating. Through experiments with benchmark circuits, it is confirmed that our clock gating method is very effective in reducing power, which otherwise the toggling based clock gating shall miss the power saving opportunity, while meeting all timing constraints.