Automation to Improve Efficiency in Power Analysis

Abstract

Power consumption is a key limitation in semiconductor industry. As we are scaling down to nano meter tech and also the increase demand of mobile products the Power becomes a very critical parameter. Power is also a showstopper for many emerging applications like ambient intelligence and sensor networks. New design techniques and tools are needed to control and limit power consumption. This project introduces innovative methods for dealing with power estimation and optimization during the early stages of the design process at RTL level. As we know asic flow includes many steps starting from specification to GDS, With analysis of power at RTL level we are adding one more step to the flow which can affect time to market and cost of the design, To reduce the effect on time to market and cost the process of rtl power estimation should be faster and it should include automation in order to reduce human efforts. This Project introduces GUI as a wrapper around the RTL power estimation tool to automate and ease the process of RTL power estimation. The GUI comes with many features that can reduce the time and human efforts. The features include scheduled Power analysis runs, Ease of generating inputs required for power estimation, easy report analysis and mailing the details related to critical run issues and results during the run automatically. The developed GUI supports the standard environment used for INTEL projects. The GUI is developed using perl, python and SQL.