Sunday 11 October 2015

Clock Gating

Clock path may be passed trough a “gated element” to achieve additional advantages. In this case, characteristics and definitions of the clock change accordingly. We call this type of clock path as “gated clock path”.
As in the following fig you can see that

LD pin is not a part of any clock but it is using for gating the original CLK signal. Such type of paths are neither a part of Clock path nor of Data Path because as per the Start Point and End Point definition of these paths, its different. So such type of paths are part of Clock gating path.

Clock gating is a popular technique used in many synchronous circuits for reducing dynamic power dissipation. Clock gating saves power by adding more logic to a circuit to prune the clock tree. Pruning the clock disables portions of the circuitry so that the flip-flops in them do not have to switch states. Switching states consumes power. When not being switched, the switching power consumption goes to zero, and only leakage currents are incurred.

Clock gating works by taking the enable conditions attached to registers, and uses them to gate the clocks. Therefore it is imperative that a design must contain these enable conditions in order to use and benefit from clock gating. This clock gating process can also save significant die area as well as power, since it removes large numbers of muxes and replaces them with clock gating logic. This clock gating logic is generally in the form of "Integrated clock gating" (ICG) cells. However, note that the clock gating logic will change the clock tree structure, since the clock gating logic will sit in the clock tree.

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