Robust SAT-Based Search Algorithm for Leakage Power Reduction

Leakage current promises to be a major contributor to power dissipation in future technologies. Bounding the maximum and minimum leakage current poses an important problem. Determining the maximum leakage ensures that the chip meets power dissipation constraints. Applying an input pattern that minimizes leakage allows extending battery life when the circuit is in stand-by mode. Finding such vectors can be expressed as a satisfiability problem. We apply in this paper an incremental SAT solver, PBS [1], to find the minimum or maximum leakage current. The solver is called as a post-process to a randomvector-generation approach. Our results indicate that using a such a generic SAT solver can improve on previously proposed random approaches [7].