METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR POWER CONSUMPTION OPTIMIZATION FOR INTEGRATED CIRCUITS

Method and apparatus for finding an assignment of voltages to all power domains of an integrated circuit such that the power consumption of an integrated circuit design is minimized and timing requirements (signal propagation delay or slack) are met. This is done by modeling both internal and external signal paths in an integrated circuit which has a number of power domains. The relationship between slack and voltage for the external and internal signal propagation paths is modeled, typically as a linear approximation. The integrated circuit design is then abstracted to a simplified form in terms of power domain relations and a model is created and solved iteratively using, e.g., linear programming, of different voltage levels for each power domain and including the slack values and their relationship between the changes in voltage and slack, for both the internal and external paths.