Data- and State-Dependent Power Characterisation and Simulation of Black-Box RTL IP Components at System-Level

BIB
Daniel Lorenz and Kim Grüttner and Wolfgang Nebel
17th Euromicro Conference on Digital Systems Design (DSD 2014)
Due to the increasing algorithmic complexity of today’s embedded systems, consideration of extra-functional properties becomes more important. Extra-functional properties like timing, power consumption, and temperature need to be validated against given requirements on all abstraction levels. For timing and power consumption at RT- and gate-level several techniques are available, but there is still a lack of methods and tools for power estimation and analyses at electronic system level (ESL) and above. Existing ESL methods use in most cases state-based methods for power simulation. This may lead especially for data-dependent designs to inaccurate results. In this paper, we extend the Power State Machine (PSM) model for back-box RTL IP components with a mechanism that regards data-dependent switching activity as Hamming distance (HD). In pipelined designs, we do not only consider the input HD but also the HDs of the internal pipeline stage registers. Since these registers of black-box IP are not observable from outside our model derives the internal HDs from previous input data. The results show that our extension achieves up to 38% better results than the previous PSM approach and up to 35% better results compared to a model considering only the input HD.
8 / 2014
inproceedings
ENERSAVE
Methodik zum Entwurf von energiesparenden, verifizierten Systemen

OFFIS Autoren

Wolfgang Nebel
Wolfgang Nebel