Title
Limits of gate-level power estimation considering real delay effects and glitches
Abstract
Gate-level power estimation based on foundry-supplied standard cell libraries is a common analysis step during digital design. Surprisingly little is known about the accuracy of this approach and the suitability for different circuit types. At the same time, commercial tools implementing this approach are employed broadly and often regarded as the reference when comparing estimation methodologies on higher levels of abstraction. This work evaluates the suitability and accuracy of gate level power estimators for combinatorial circuits of different logic depths in order to test the ability of handling real gate delay effects. While the basic methodology leads to estimation errors of up to 32 % for the tested circuits, by various improvements in the work flow the accuracy can be improved at the cost of longer runtimes. Apart from recommendations on improving accuracy this work identifies shortcomings in the established approach and highlights circuit characteristics that tend to influence estimation accuracy.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1109/ISSOC.2014.6972437
ISSoC
Keywords
Field
DocType
tested circuit characteristics,power electronics,gate-level power estimation error limits,combinational circuits,digital design,delay circuits,estimation theory,accuracy evaluation,real delay glitches,integrated circuit design,suitability evaluation,logic depths,handling real gate delay effects,work flow improvements,commercial tools,costing,longer runtime cost improvement,foundry-supplied standard cell library,logic gates,combinatorial circuits,benchmark testing,estimation,switches
Delay calculation,Glitch,Logic gate,Pass transistor logic,Computer science,Real-time computing,Standard cell,Electronic circuit,Asynchronous circuit,Estimator
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
2
0.47
5
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Michael Meixner172.57
Tobias G. Noll219937.51