Power Saving

DESCRIPTION: Below theory on power consumption in CMOS based digital logic will be helpful in understanding the context of this problem.

Dynamic Power Consumption

• Switching Power: This occurs when transistors change states (0 ↔ 1), leading to energy loss as capacitive loads charge and discharge. It increases with higher clock speeds and voltage levels.
  🔹 Tips to Reduce: Use lower supply voltage, optimize logic to minimize unnecessary transitions, and employ clock gating to disable unused circuit sections.
• Short-Circuit Power: When both PMOS and NMOS transistors in a CMOS gate momentarily conduct during switching, a direct path between power and ground forms, wasting energy.
  🔹 Tips to Reduce: Reduce supply voltage, use well-balanced rise/fall times in signals, and optimize transistor sizing to minimize short-circuit current.

Static Power Consumption

• Leakage Power: Even when transistors are idle, leakage currents flow due to imperfections in transistor behavior, especially in modern deep-submicron technologies.
  🔹 Tips to Reduce: Use high-threshold voltage transistors where speed is not critical, apply power gating to turn off unused blocks, and leverage advanced fabrication techniques like FinFETs.

Short-Term Power Spikes

• Glitch Power: Extra power is consumed when unintended transitions occur due to timing mismatches in combinational logic.
  🔹 Tips to Reduce: Optimize logic paths to minimize unnecessary transitions, use balanced pipeline stages, and apply glitch filtering techniques.

PROBLEM STATEMENT:
A shift register based delay element is a very common occurrence in digital designs. At many points in the datapath, the designer needs to delay a bunch of data for N clock cycles in order to latency match it with some other parallel path.

Your IP library has one such simple delay module that takes in a parameter N to implement a shift-register style delay element where one stage feeds into the next N times to achieve the delay.