Formalizing designer's preferences for multiattribute optimization with application to leakage-delay tradeoffs

Traditional single-attribute optimization problems force a designer to choose either power or delay as the objective function and minimize it with constraints on other attributes. However this approach does not provide the designer with enough freedom to incorporate tradeoffs between various attributes such as leakage and delay. In this paper¹ we present a utility theoretic approach for the joint optimization of leakage and delay. This provides a general framework for quantifying a designer's preferences for tradeoffs between leakage and delay. We show that energy-delay product (EDP) is an element of a larger class of such utility functions. The resulting multi-attribute optimization problem is modeled as a convex gate sizing problem that is solved using Geometric Programming. The resulting solution is a design point that is optimal with respect to the designer's preferences.