Download early power analysis tips

SANTA CLARA, USA: Sequence Design’s Tom Miller, Vice President and Head of R&D, Front-End Products, is one of the featured authors in a new book, “A Practical Guide to Low-Power Design – User Experience with CPF,” that has been released by the Power Forward Initiative (PFI). The book can be downloaded free of charge from the PFI Web site.

The Sequence chapter, “Early Power Analysis with CPF,” details how the biggest power reductions can be achieved during architectural tradeoffs and describes multiple techniques for power analysis and optimization along with real-world examples of these approaches in action.

“PFI has gathered an impressive list of expert contributors for this book, and are once again demonstrating how the Common Power Format (CPF) helps maintain design integrity throughout the flow, while creating an environment to maximize power savings in complex designs,” Miller said.

For example, Sequence’s PowerTheater can analyze designs using multiple-supply voltages and power shutoff techniques to help users make design tradeoffs at RTL resulting in more power-efficient designs, and then generate an output CPF file that captures the design intent originally specified as well as derived design intent. This CPF file will be more complete based on the automatic generation of level shifter, isolation and power switch rules as well as a complete description of the power modes that may need to be filled out, resulting in fewer errors passed to downstream tools.

In addition to Sequence, contributors to the new book include ARC, ARM, Faraday, Freescale, Fujitsu, NEC Electronics, NXP, and TSMC. PFI will be showcasing the new book in Si2’s DAC Booth 1614.