In large controller-datapath systems, the switching activity of datapath is administered by controller. The unnecessary switching activity will cause more power consumption, and therefore the design of controllers (i.e. Finite State Machines, FSMs) will influence the whole power consumption of the systems. The state assignment and output encoding are the two major factors influencing the power of system under the hardware implementation of controllers. In this paper, we present an integer linear programming (ILP) method to solve the state assignment and output encoding problems. The purpose is to reduce switching activity such that the goal of power optimization can be achieved. It has not to reschedule the operations of datapath under timing and resource constraints and has no extra area overhead. In order to verify the effectiveness of our proposed ILP approach, we use this approach to implement several controller-datapath systems. Experimental results show that our proposed approach achieves an average of 30.513% power savings compared to the traditional area optimal synthesis tool, SIS, where power is not considered. Our proposed approach does not cause extra area overhead while achieving a significant power saving of systems.

The state assignment is one of the most important problems in hardware implementation of controllers (finite state machines, FSMs). Traditional heuristics include simulated annealing (SA), greedy approach, and recursive Min-Cut partitioning. Since these methods can¡¦t reduce both area and power, thus we propose a new approach which using integer linear programming (ILP) to solve the state assignment. The proposed of ILP approach can set the weight and reach best solution between less area and low power. The approach can find out the best state assignment for both low-area and low power consumption. In addition, we also use ILP to solve the output encoding of controller in order to reduce the power consumption of datapath. Finally, to verify the effectiveness of our proposed approach, we do some experiments on several MCNC FSM benchmarks and controller-datapath systems. The experimental results show that a significant power and area savings can be achieved.