ALPS: a peak power estimation tool for sequential circuits

Tools for evaluating the worst-case peak power consumption of sequential circuits are highly useful to designers of low-power circuits. Previously proposed methods search for the initial state and the couple of vectors with maximum consumption, without fully considering the reachability of the initial state. This paper shows that this approach can lead to a significant underestimation of the maximum peak power consumption and proposes a new algorithm that overcomes this drawback. Experimental results show that for many circuits the algorithm is able to provide better results than those known up to now, while an approximate version is able to deal even with the largest benchmark circuits.