DCPG: Double-control power gating technique for a 28 nm Cortex™-A9 MPCore Quad-core processor

As the technology scales into deep sub-micron regime, leakage power has become comparable to dynamic power, playing an important role in total power consumption of modern processors. Power gating is a well-known technique to reduce leakage power by switching off the power supply of idle logic blocks. This paper proposes a novel Double-Control Power Gating (DCPG) which can lower the IR drop and enable more power savings. We applied the proposed technique to the embedded ARM® Cortex™-A9 MPCore Quad-core processor in 28 nm technology. Experimental results show that DCPG achieves 99.8% leakage power reduction when the CPU is powered off.