Power Macromodeling for High Level Power Estimation

A modeling approach is presented that captures the dependence of the power dissipation of a combinational logic circuit on its input output signal switching activity. The resulting power macromodel, consisting of a single three dimensional table, can be used to estimate the power consumed in the circuit for any given input output signal statistics. Given a low-level typically gatelevel description of the circuit, we describe a characterization process by which such a table model can be automatically built. In contrast to other proposed techniques, this can be done for any given logic circuit without any user intervention, and applies to all possible input output signal statistics; it does not require one to construct specialized analytical equations for the power dissipation. The three dimensions of our table-based model are the average input signal probability, average input transition density, and average output zero-delay transition density. This approach has been implemented and ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: DAC
• Authors: Subodh Gupta, Farid N. Najm
• Keywords: Computer Architecture, DAC 1997, Input Output Signal, Input Signal, Output Signal Statistics