Out in Front: January 18, 1996
By letting you estimate power early in the design process, Sente’s Watt Watcher tool suite eases a bottleneck to designing chips with critical power requirements. One of the tools in the suite, Watt Watcher/Architect works during the architectural design and before you run any simulations. You use this tool in a probabilistic mode for early estimation of power consumption. After you generate and simulate a register-transfer-level representation of the design, Watt Watcher/Architect uses the simulation results to provide a better power estimate. Finally, after you synthesize the design to a gate-level representation, another tool, Watt Watcher/Gate, estimates power in subsections of the design.The key tool is Watt Watcher/Architect, because you can use it before you do any circuit synthesis. Watt Watcher/Architect is hierarchical; you use it on complete chip designs. It offers fast execution time, allowing you to perform various "what-if" analyses on a design to determine which of several architectural configurations meet your power budget. Typically, you supply a Verilog description and a stimulation vector file to the tool. Watt Watcher/Architect uses synthesis technology to infer the circuitry of the design and to analyze its power requirements. Watt Watcher/Architect uses "state-dependent" memory power modeling to accurately estimate memory blocks. The tool also estimates design size and clock loading, providing a reasonable estimate of the power that the clock circuitry consumes. After an analysis, Watt Watcher/Architect gives you the design’s total dynamic and static power consumption, the power each module consumes, the power the clock circuits consume, net activity, and other design-critical information. You then review the results, in a graphical format, to determine which portions of the design you may need to change to reduce power. Watt Watcher/Architect costs less than $40,000. Watt Watcher/Gate costs $5000. Both are available on Sun and Hewlett-Packard workstations. — by Jim Lipman
Sente Inc,
Chelmsford, MA. (508) 244-1100.