Abstract
We present an effective switching activity modeling and estimation technique for components under resource sharing. The model uses word-level signal statistics to generate a single parameter, called signal strength. By using the signal strength, we can construct power models for the both cases of sharing and non-sharing of computing resources. The model enables us to effectively estimate switching activity at higher level of design abstraction. We have conducted several experiments using both synthetic and real data to evaluate our method. We have compared competing architectures for their relative power consumption for different components. The results show that average difference between the proposed method and very accurate power simulation (as opposed to switching estimation) using PowerMill is up to 12%.
Highlights
Power efficient applications such as portable computing and wireless communication devices have driven the VLSI industry to take power consumption as one of the major implementation constraints
strength based switching activity estimation (SSSAE) works on higher level of design abstraction, i.e., architectural or register-transfer level (RTL), while PowerMill needs detailed implementation at the circuit level
Our evaluation shows that there is about 6-17% difference in switching activity estimation and very accurate power simulation on the relative power consumption of different components of an implementation
Summary
Power efficient applications such as portable computing and wireless communication devices have driven the VLSI industry to take power consumption as one of the major implementation constraints. High-level power estimation at architectural or register-transfer level enables designers to evaluate competing architectures in the early phase of the design process. The designers can explore design space with larger flexibility and perform better trade-offs at higher levels. Several bottom-up approaches have been proposed to address this issue [1 5]. The power factor approximation technique in [1] uses a constant
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