An Efficient Framework For High-level Power Exploration

Although SystemC is considered the most promising language for system-on-chip functional modeling, it doesn't come with power modeling capabilities. This work presents PowerSC, a novel power estimation framework which instruments SystemC for power characterization, modeling and estimation. Since it is entirely based on SystemC, PowerSC allows consistent power modeling from the highest to the lowest abstraction level. Besides, the framework's API provides facilities to integrate alternative modeling techniques, either at the same or at different abstraction levels. As a result, the required power evaluation infrastructure is reduced to a minimum: the standard SystemC library, the PowerSC library itself and a C++ compiler. Experimental results show both the effectiveness and the efficiency of our framework. On the one hand, two well-known macromodeling techniques were easily integrated into the framework, leading to acceptable average errors at the RT level. On the other hand, library characterization was more than 13x faster as compared to a typical industrial flow. ©2007 IEEE.10461049(2002) SystemC 2.0 User's Guide, , Version 2.0 ed, OSCILiu, D., Svensson, C., Power consumption estimation in CMOS VLSI chips (1994) IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, pp. 663-670. , JuneMüller-Glaser, K.D., Hirsch, K., Neusinger, K., Estimating essential design characteristics to support project planning for ASIC design management (1991) Proc of ICCAD, pp. 148-151. , NovLandman, P.E., Rabaey, J.M., Activity-sensitive architectural power analysis (1996) IEEE Trans. on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits, pp. 571-587. , JuneMehta, H., Owens, R.M., Irwin, M.J., Energy characterization based on clustering (1996) Proc. of DAC, pp. 702-707Raghunathan, A., Dey, S., Jha, N.K., Register-transfer level estimation techniques for switching activity and power consumption (1996) Proc. of the IEEE/ACM intern. conference on CAD, pp. 158-165Gupta, S., Najm, F.N., Energy and peak-current per-cycle estimation at RTL (2003) IEEE Trans. Very Large Scale Integr. Syst, 11 (4), pp. 525-537Anton, M., Colonescu, I., Macii, E., Poncino, M., Fast characterization of RTL power macromodels (2001) Proc. of ICECSYe, W., Vijaykrishnan, N., Kandemir, M., Irwin, M.J., The design and use of SimplePower: A cycle-accurate energy estimation tool (2000) Proc. of DAC, pp. 340-345Power Compiler User Guide, X-2005.09 ed., Synopsys Inc., 2005Nebel, W., Helms, D., High-level power estimation and analysis (2005) Low-Power Electronics Design, , CRC Press, ch. 38Stammermann, A., Kruse, L., Nebel, W., Pratsch, A., Schmidt, E., Schulte, M., Schulz, A., System level optimization and design space exploration for low power (2001) Proc. of the 14th international symposium on Systems synthesis, pp. 142-146Klein, F., Azevedo, R., Araujo, G., High-level switching activity prediction through sampled monitored simulation (2005) Proceedings of the International Symposyum on System-on-Chip 2005, , NovemberGupta, S., Najm, F.N., Power macromodeling for high level power estimation (1997) Design Automation Conference, pp. 365-370Macii, E., Poncino, M., Power macro-models for high-level power estimation (2005) Low-Power Electronics Design, , CRC Press, ch. 3