Power Estimation in Digital Circuits Using Implicit Enumeration Techniques

As power consumption becomes a major concern of integrated circuit and
system designers, the need for adequate methods to quantify and
predict power is growing significantly. However, the power dissipation
is generally considered to be more difficult to compute than the
estimation of other circuit parameters, like area and delay.

Existing approaches for power estimation can be divided into two
categories: simulation based methods and probabilistic methods.
Simulation based methods can model very accurately the spatial and
temporal correlations present at the input and internal signals, but
require the existence of a trace that accurately matches the
conditions of operation of the system. These methods can be very
inefficient if the trace is very long.
Probabilistic methods do not require the existence of a trace and can
be used to characterize circuits in a manner that is independent of
the inputs presented. However, the most efficient approaches proposed
to date allow only for very simplified models of temporal and spatial
correlations, and, therefore, obtain estimates of limited accuracy.

In this thesis, we present a probabilistic power estimation method
that accurately computes the power dissipation for combinational and
sequential circuits at the logic level, taking into account all
signal correlations for zero, unit and generic
delay models.

Circuits are implicitly
characterized in a way that is independent of a specific input trace. The
input correlation modeling proposed is based on the definition of a
set of functions that, in a simple but flexible way,
describe the input signal statistics. In this method all functions
are manipulated using a binary decision diagram based representation.

The power estimates are obtained computing the switching activity by
implicitly enumerating the number of
transitions for each node of the circuit.