McPOWER: a Monte Carlo approach to power estimation

Excessive power dissipation in integrated circuits causes overheating and can lead to soft errors and or permanent damage. The severity of the problem increases in proportion to the level of integration, so that power estimation tools are badly needed for present-day technology. Traditional simulation-based approaches simulate the circuit using test functional input pattern sets. This is expensive and does not guarantee a meaningful power value. Other recent approaches have used probabilistic techniques in order to cover a large set of inputs patterns. However, they trade-o accuracy for speed in ways that are not always acceptable. In this paper, we investigate an alternative technique that combines the accuracy of simulation-based techniques with the speed of the probabilistic techniques. The resulting method is statistical in nature; it consists of applying randomly-generated input patterns to the circuit and monitoring, with a simulator, the resulting power value. This is continued...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1992
• Where: ICCAD
• Authors: Richard Burch, Farid N. Najm, Ping Yang, Timothy N. Trick
• Keywords: Excessive Power Dissipation, Hardware, ICCAD 1992, Input Patterns, Power Value