Managing digital-system power at the system level

Abstract

The increasing trend in using mobile devices causes the power consumption to become the key aspect in modern digital systems design. The current flow for low-power design involves the use of some power-reduction technique at the RTL (Register Transfer Level) or lower levels. This paper describes an extension of current low-power design flow. It proposes the power-intent specification based on UPF (Unified Power Format) in an abstract form and integrates it into a system-level model. Such an abstract level gives us the opportunity to manage power with higher efficiency.