Asynchronous control of low-power gated-clock finite-state-machines

An efficient approach to reduce power consumption in a synchronous Finite-State Machine (FSM) is to de-compose it, according to a partitioning algorithm, to a number of sub-FSMs that interact through some communication signals. Only one sub-FSM is clocked at a time and low power operation is obtained by only clocking the active sub-FSM. In this paper we introduce a new asynchronous communication control for the interacting sub-FSMs, which reduces the total capacitance switched by the system clock. Experimental results show that this leads to significant power savings when the FSM is partitioned into many sub-FSMs.