State Assignment for Low Power Consumption in Sequential Circuits

Abstract

In this paper we present an algorithm for the state assignment in finite state machines targeted for minimal switching power dissipation. Two states are assigned codes closer in Hamming distance if the state transition probability between them is higher by our algorithm. In this way we can reduce the average number of bit changes associated with state transitions. The proposed algorithm achieves this goal by modifying the given state transition graph so that it can be embedded into an n-cube. Experimental results show that this method greatly reduce the switching activity generated by state transitions.