Compact vector generation for accurate power simulation

Abstract

Transistor-level power simulators have been popularly used to estimate the power dissipation of a CMOS circuit. These tools strike a good balance between the conventional transistor-level simulators, such as SPICE, and the logic-level power estimators with regard to accuracy and speed. However, it is still too time-consuming to run these tools for large designs. To simulate one-million functional vectors for a 50 K-gate circuit, these power simulators may take months to complete. In this paper, we propose an approach to generate a compact set of vectors that can mimic the transition behavior of a much larger set of functional vectors, which is given by the designer or extracted from application programs. This compact set of vectors can then replace the functional vectors for power simulation to reduce the simulation time while still retaining a high degree of accuracy. We present experimental results to show the efficiency and accuracy of this approach.