Interconnect-driven short-circuit power modeling

Early and accurate power estimation has become very important to meet the power budget in modern electronics design. In order to achieve early figures on power consumption, functional units have been modeled as black boxes and their respective power consumption has been modeled as a function of signal activity in inputs and outputs. Interconnects, and the associated load capacitances, are accounted for by simply adding the switching power consumption of the interconnect to the estimated power consumption of the functional unit driving the interconnect. Thus, the effects of load capacitance on short-circuit power in the functional units are not considered. The purpose of the present paper is two-fold: first, we put some focus on the review the effects that load capacitance has on short-circuit power. Secondly, we present two methods for interconnect-driven estimation of short-circuit power in state-of-the-art electronics design.