Accurate power estimation for large sequential circuits

Abstract

A power estimation approach is presented in which blocks of consecutive vectors are selected at random from a user-supplied realistic input vector set and the circuit is simulated for each block starting from an unknown state. This leads to two (upper and lower) bounds on the desired power value which can be quite tight (under 10% difference between the two in many cases). As a result, the power dissipation is obtained by simulating only a fraction of the potentially very large vector set.