Event-Based Power Analysis Integrated with Timing Characterization and Logic Simulation

The decoupled approach of timing simulation and power analysis, taken by most commercial tool chains, presents problems with accuracy of power estimation, and non-interactive use of power estimation tools. The work we are presenting proposes a distributed event-based power simulation environment that is coupled with timing analysis. This environment is based on SystemC/C++ gate models, among which power and timing simulation tasks are distributed. This also removes the overhead of many file exchanges required in the decoupled commercial tools. We show that our integrated simulation runs faster than any of the required passes of conventional simulations. This proposed coupled estimation environment reaches up to 25X speed-up in runtime for large circuits and large simulation cycles, while retaining the estimation accuracy with an average error of 1.13% in comparison with the commercial power estimation tools.