Power Modeling

Power Exploration

The VisualSim Power Modeling Toolkit is a System-Level Power exploration solution that captures the generation, storage and consumption of power in a system or semiconductor. The model captures the state change of each device in the model to track the dynamic power. The power information for each device is maintained in a table. The table is made up of listing of states, expression to dynamically define the power value of the state and the logic for moving devices from one state to another. The power toolkit consists of the power table, battery, power management language, RegEx functions and energy harvesters.

The solution enables the Architect to trade-off performance and power in a single architecture model. The model can be of a SoC or a large distributed system. This Power Analysis is conducted in the specification phase. The power analysis does not require detailed software code, RTL or placement information to execute the simulation. Depending on the available information, the power reports can be studied as the relative performance of two architectures or an absolute value of a design.

 

Instantaneous Power Sample

Battery Charge Remaining

Standard reports generated include:

  • Instantaneous and peak power consumed
  • Average power per device
  • Power per task
  • Timing diagram to show the state waveform
  • Battery charge available
  • Change in battery life and capacity over time

The power analyzer support the modeling of standard and custom components; as few as 3 power states to as many as 19 states per device.

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 is available as a definition.

The power manager is fully integrated with the Architecture Modeling Toolkit, Server blocks and Script. Function calls to change state and power in a state enable dynamic voltage frequency scaling, the construction of custom behavior and modeling power management.