Maximum current estimation in CMOS circuits
DAC '92 Proceedings of the 29th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference
Resolving signal correlations for estimating maximum currents in CMOS combinational circuits
DAC '93 Proceedings of the 30th international Design Automation Conference
Gate-level timing verification using waveform narrowing
EURO-DAC '94 Proceedings of the conference on European design automation
IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems
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This paper deals with the problem of estimating the average power consumption (per clock cycle) of CMOS digital circuits. A new pattern-independent method is proposed for computing an upper bound on the switching activity, and therefore the average power, of a combinational circuit described at the gate level. The method is based on the propagation of abstract waveform sets, described down to the level of individual transitions. The view of a gate as a relation between input and output signals, described by forward and partial inverse functions, permits the determination of a tight upper bound on the power using a constraint resolution method based on waveform narrowing. A fully scalable, case analysis-based algorithm provides at any step an upper bound and, with enough resources (CPU time), it can continue up to the exact solution. The paper presents the theoretical background, a description of the implementation, and results on benchmark circuits.