Is Your Low Power Design Switched On?

Power is the key driver in most electronic systems design. Managing system power to increase battery life and reduce electricity consumption and heat generation are key considerations in developing many types of systems from mobile handsets, portable navigation systems and compute servers. New design techniques including clock gating, power gating, multi-voltage and dynamic voltage and frequency scaling have been employed to reduce both dynamic and static energy consumption. The design of low power electronic systems creates new design and verification challenges. Today's systems-on-chip are composed of large IP blocks approaching and exceeding 1 million gates. How can the system low power design intent be applied without requiring modification to and time consuming re-verification of the IP's golden RTL code? How can the functional impacts of power gating, retention and isolation be verified early in the design process when it is cheaper and easier to fix problems? Can implementation-dependent low power design functionality such as accurate retention save and restore protocols be verified prior to synthesis? In this presentation, we will discuss Accellcra's Unified Power Format standard for low power design intent and using UPF for verification.