A novel approach to estimate power consumption using SystemC transaction level modelling

The increasing complexity of current day Systems-on-Chip and the rising market demands for low power devices has necessitated the need to perform power analysis of the complete system-on-chip at system level. This would facilitate selection of optimal system architecture and opportunity to optimize the selected system design for reduced power consumption in the silicon as much more design optimization opportunities are available at system level in contrast to Register Transfer Level (RTL). Transaction level model provides the conceptual implementation of the design at higher abstraction level above RTL and is available much early in the design cycle as against RTL, hence, is being used in industries for early software development and functional verification of the hardware. In this work, we present a methodology to estimate power consumption of an IP at transaction level by capitalizing the existing transaction level model of the corresponding IP. The proposed methodology makes use of SystemC transaction level model not specifically designed with power estimation in mind. We then validate the proposed method against RTL for accuracy and speed. The proposed approach enables estimation of dynamic power consumption and leakage power consumption with an error within 20% of RTL and total power consumption with an error within 12% with respect to RTL. In terms of speed-up, the proposed approach enables 20x faster simulation, hence, faster power estimation compared to estimating power at RTL. The accuracy and speed-up of the proposed approach are illustrated through experimental results.