Advanced Power Estimation Techniques

Existing power estimation techniques at the gate level and the circuit level can be classi ed into two classes static and dynamic Static techniques rely on statistical information such as the mean activity of the input signals and their correlations about the input stream to estimate the internal switching activity of the circuit While these are very e cient their main limitation is that they cannot accurately capture factors such as slew rates glitch generation and propagation DC ghting etc Dynamic techniques explicitly simulate the circuit under a typical input vector stream They can be applied at both the circuit and gate levels Their main shortcoming is however that they are very slow Moreover their results are highly dependent on the simulated sequence To alleviate this dependence and thereby produce a trustworthy power estimate the required number of simulated vectors is usually high which further exacerbates the run time problem