K2: an estimator for peak sustainable power of VLSI circuits

New measures of peak power in the context of sequential circuits are proposed. This paper presents an automatic procedure to obtain very good lower bounds on these measures as well as the actual input vectors that attain such bounds. The initial state of the circuit is an important factor in determining the amount of switching activity in sequential circuits and is taken into account. A peak power estimator tool K2 was developed using genetic techniques. Experiments show that vector sequences generated by K2 give much more accurate estimates for peak power dissipation than the estimates made from randomly generated sequences.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: ISLPED
• Authors: Michael S. Hsiao, Elizabeth M. Rudnick, Janak H. Patel
• Keywords: Hardware, ISLPED 1997, Peak Power, Peak Power Estimator, Sequential Circuits