State encoding for low power embedded controllers

Power dissipation has become one of the main issues during embedded systems design in the recent years, due to the continuous increase of the integration level and the operating frequency. The present paper affords the problem of reducing the power dissipation in embedded controllers represented as Finite State Machines (FSMs). The aim of the work is to propose an approach to optimize state encoding for low power embedded FSMs, starting from a probabilistic description of the FSMs. Experimental results have been obtained by applying the proposed state encoding techniques to benchmark circuits. The results have also been compared to previous state encoding methods.