Hierarchical-Analysis-Based Fast Chip-Scale Power Estimation Method for Large and Complex LSIs

Yuichi NAKAMURA
Takeshi YOSHIMURA

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences   Vol.E89-A    No.12    pp.3458-3463
Publication Date: 2006/12/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1337
DOI: 10.1093/ietfec/e89-a.12.3458
Print ISSN: 0916-8508
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on VLSI Design and CAD Algorithms)
Category: Simulation and Verification
Keyword: 
SoC,  power consumption,  power estimation,  toggle rate,  

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Summary: 
This paper presents a novel power estimation method for large and complex LSIs. The proposed method is based on simulation and is used for analyzing the ways in chip-scale gate-level circuits including processors and memory are affected by gated-clock power reduction and the voltage drop due to electrical resistance. The chip-scale power estimation based on simulation patterns generally takes enormous time. In order to reduce the time to obtain accurate estimation results based on simulation patterns, we introduce three approaches: "partitioning of target LSIs and simulation pattern," "memory modeling," and "processor modeling." After placing and routing, the target LSIs are partitioned into hierarchical blocks, memory, and processors. The power consumption of each hierarchical block is calculated by using the partitioned patterns generated from chip-scale simulation patterns. The power consumption of the processor and memory blocks is estimated by a method considering the static power consumption and the rate of LSI activity ratio. Experimental results for a commercial 0.18 µm-technology media processing chip show that the proposed method is 23 times faster than the conventional method without partitioning and that both the results are almost the same.


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