SemiEngineering: Raising The Abstraction Level For Power

Excerpt from article: “Raising The Abstraction Level For Power“

Early analysis can lead to the largest gains. “Certainly, higher abstraction provides more analysis capabilities and is much faster,” says Mohammed Fahad, product specialist at Mentor, a Siemens Business. “Estimating power at a higher abstraction level becomes even more attractive to the user since it requires less preparation from a data readiness point of view.”

RTL power analysis provides a balance between accuracy and performance. It is also early enough in the design flow that serious architectural problems can be identified and corrected. “The tolerance limits are more relaxed at RT level compared to gate level,” says Fahad. “It is a tradeoff between accuracy and time. It is a lot faster to ‘estimate’ RTL power compared to gates, plus it is happening at the very early stage of the design where there is little or no physical information available. The designer is not really looking for an accurate measurement of the power dissipation, but is only concerned about the ball-park number or a rough distribution of power across the design. In other words, trying to see the trend of power and locating power hotspots in the design so that power-hungry part of the design could be considered for power reduction.”

Read the entire article on SemiEngineering originally published on May 9TH, 2019.