Estimation of power dissipation using a novel power macromodeling technique

  • Authors:
  • Zhanping Chen;K. Roy;E. K. Chong

  • Affiliations:
  • Intel Corp., Hillsboro, OR;-;-

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

In this paper, we develop a novel technique based on Markov chains to accurately estimate power sensitivities to primary inputs in CMOS sequential circuits. A key application of power sensitivities is to construct a complicated power surface in the specification-space so as to easily obtain the power dissipation under any distribution of primary inputs, thereby offering an effective power macromodel for high-level power estimation. We demonstrate that such a power surface can be approximated by only a limited number of representative points. This benefit dramatically reduces the CPU and memory requirements. We have verified the feasibility and accuracy of the new technique to estimate power sensitivities on a large number of sequential benchmark circuits. Results on the power dissipation under different distributions of primary inputs demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our power macromodeling technique