Hardware Accelerated Power Estimation

Coburn, Joel; Ravi, S.; Raghunathan, Anand

doi:10.1109/date.2005.168

Cited by 6 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 11 publications

(16 reference statements)

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“…Traditional power measurement approaches involved modeling, profiling or sampling the power consumption [4], [5]. Modeling of circuit at various levels of hierarchy and power estimation by simulation of such models is an established practice [4].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Low Power Real-time On-Chip Power Sensor in 45-nm SOI

Bhagavatula

Jung

2012

IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst. I

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This paper introduces a real-time on-chip power and temperature sensor for active power management in scaled CMOS technologies. In a distinct departure from earlier power estimation techniques, this sensor measures the voltage drop due to a current load and converts it into pulse counts to get a power estimate in real time. Linear regression is used to estimate load current based on the measured output frequency at a given temperature. The same sensor is also used to estimate temperature in a mode where output time period decreases linearly with temperature. Measurement results show accuracy to within for temperature estimation in the range of 22 -100 and within 10% of the actual power consumed (for loads 3.3 mA). Fabricated in 45-nm SOI technology, this power and temperature sensor occupies an area of and has a power overhead of 120 at 1.2 V supply.Index Terms-Low power, on-chip sensor, power management, power sensor, temperature sensor.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Low Power Real-time On-Chip Power Sensor in 45-nm SOI

Bhagavatula

Jung

2012

IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst. I

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“…In [26], we proposed the basic concept of power emulation and offered an estimate of the speedup possible using this technique. However, realizing the benefit of power emulation requires addressing the main challenge outlined in this work, namely, reducing the area overhead due to power estimation hardware.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Power emulation

Coburn

Ravi

Raghunathan

2005

Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference on Design Automation - DAC '05

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In this work, we propose a new paradigm called power emulation, which exploits hardware acceleration to drastically speedup power estimation. Power emulation is based on the observation that most power estimation tools typically perform the following sequence of operations: simulating the circuit to obtain value traces or statistics for the inputs of its constituent components, evaluating power models for each circuit component based on the input values seen during simulation, and aggregating the power consumption of individual components to compute the circuit's power consumption. We further recognize that the steps involved in power estimation (power model evaluation, aggregation) can themselves be thought of as synthesizable functions and implemented as hardware circuits. Thus, any given design can be enhanced by adding to it "power estimation hardware", and the resulting power model enhanced circuit can be mapped onto a hardware prototyping platform. While drastic speedups in power estimation (orders of magnitude) are possible using this approach, a significant challenge arises due to the increase in circuit size as a result of adding power estimation hardware. We propose a systematic methodology to reduce the size of the power model enhanced circuit through a suite of techniques, including power model reuse across different circuit components, regulating the granularity of components for power modeling, exploiting inter-component power correlations, resource sharing for power model computations, and the use of block memories for efficient storage within power models. We demonstrate the benefits of the proposed power emulation paradigm by applying it to register-transfer level (RTL) power estimation for industrial designs, resulting in speedups from around 10X to over 500X compared to state-of-the-art commercial power estimation tools.

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