Formulation and validation of an energy dissipation model for the clock generation circuitry and distribution networks

Proliferation of mobile devices and increasing design complexity have made low power consumption one of the major factors guiding digital design. The clock distribution and generation circuitry forms a critical component of current synchronous digital systems and is known to consume around a quarter of the power budget of current microprocessors. We propose and validate a high level model for evaluating the energy dissipation of the clock distribution and generation circuitry. Our validation results show that our model is fairly accurate and will be suitable for use in architectural level energy simulators. We believe access to this model can precipitate further research at high-level design stages in optimizing the system clock power.