Silicon area, performance, and testability have been, so far, the major des
ign constraints to be met during the development of digital very-large-scal
e-integration (VLSI) systems. In recent years, however, things have changed
; increasingly, power has been given weight comparable to the other design
parameters. This is primarily due to the remarkable success of personal com
puting devices and wireless communication systems, which demand high-speed
computations with low power consumption. In addition, there exists a strong
pressure for manufacturers of high-end products to keep power under contro
l, due to the increased costs of packaging and cooling this type of devices
. Last, the need of ensuring high circuit reliability has turned out to be
more stringent. The availability of tools for the automatic design of low-p
ower VLSI systems has thus become necessary. More specifically, following a
natural trend, the interests of the researchers have lately shifted to the
investigation of power modeling, estimation, synthesis, and optimization t
echniques that account for power dissipation during the early stages of the
design flow.
This paper surveys representative contributions to this area that have appe
ared in the recent literature.