VisualSim
Power Modeling Toolkit
Applications
- Compare
the relative power consumed by different architectures by varying the
components selected, component attributes or topology changes
- Explore power allocation
and scheduling strategies in products dependent on a battery or in a power-limited envrionment
- Optimize software performance such as thread allocations, loop size and processor load
balancing, based on the instantaneous power consumed
- Make hardware-software partitioning decisions
The VisualSim Power Modeling Toolkit is the first System-Level Power
exploration solution that captures dynamic power of the entire system
in a model. The solution enables the Architect to trade-off
performance and power in a single architecture model. The model can of
an SoC or a Distributed, Networked system.
This
power analysis is conducted in the specification phase.
Information can either be representative or accurate from the
datasheet. The Power Analysis does not require detailed software
code, RTL or placement information to execute the simulation.
Using
this solution, an Architect can determine the instantaneous and
average power consumed by the entire system or a specific
component. The power exploration can handle both standard
components such as processors, and custom components such as hardware
accelerators.
Figure 1: VisualSim Platform Power Modeling and Analysis
The Power Modeler updates the instantaneous, average and cumulative
power using dynamic state change information of the individual
devices. The power can be analyzed on an existing system model by instantiating
this power module and entering certain power attributes for each device or
IP block. The effect of the power management performance such as transition cycles are available as a definition.
The power
manager is fully integrated with the Architecture Modeling Toolkit, scheduler blocks and
Script. Moreover there are function calls to view current power consumed by device, update the power levels, change
the power state and charge the battery.
Models created using non-VisualSim components such as ISS and SystemC, can be also be
used in conjunction with the Power Modeling Toolkit.
