A Stream Compaction Technique Based on Multi-Level Power Simulation

One way of minimizing the time required to perform simulation-based power estimation is that of reducing the length of the input trace to be simulated, at the price of the introduction of some errors in the estimation results. Existing techniques exploit the knowledge of some statistical and/or spectral information about the original input trace to generate a shorter stream that matches such characteristics as much as possible; this is with the objective of minimizing the estimation error. Very often, however, the stream to be simulated consists of validation patterns provided by the designer, whose power consumption may vary sensibly over time as the system responds to the inputs. In these cases, classical stream compaction solutions are not very suitable, and may result in unacceptable errors. In this paper, we introduce a compaction technique that specifically targets user-provided traces characterized by a large variance of the average power dissipation over time. The proposed appr.