Raising The Abstraction of Power: Trends

Semiconductor Engineering, July 2014

Design requirements for today’s system-on-chip (SoC) devices need a comprehensive power analysis methodology from system to register-transfer-language (RTL) to gate for successful system design for power management. System designers historically used complex spreadsheets to calculate power consumption, which led to problems like limited reuse, cumbersome sharing, error-prone formulas and no dynamic system results. A reliable alternative is performing simulation at many points in the design to achieve systems-level power savings.