Low-Power Front-End VLSI Design Techniques for Energy-Efficient System-on-Chip Architectures

Abstract

Power consumption is a primary design constraint in modern System-on-Chip (SoC) architectures. Front-end VLSI techniques (RTL through logic synthesis) are crucial for achieving energy efficiency before committing to costly back-end processes. This paper surveys contemporary front-end low-power techniques, proposes an integrated RTL-level methodology combining activity reduction (clock gating, operand isolation), power-intent driven synthesis (multi-voltage domains and multi-threshold assignment), algorithmic/approximate computing at HLS/RTL, and dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) orchestration. We implement a prototype SoC subsystem (RISC-V core + accelerator + memory interface) in an RTL simulation flow and evaluate power, timing, and area using gate-level power estimation. Results from our simulation experiments show cumulative dynamic power reductions of 45–62% and leakage reductions up to 48% relative to a baseline RTL without power optimizations, while keeping critical path timing penalty under 7%. The paper includes practical design guidelines, pseudocode for an automated RTL power-optimizer, and a comparative analysis with recent literature.