Power Intent from Initial ESL Prototypes: Extracting Power Management Parameters*

The increase in digital circuit complexity not only stems from sophisticated functionality, but also from power concerns. Power concerns are addressed via the realization of power intent (the specification for power). Unlike functional specifications, power intent is generally implicit within an initial ESL Prototype. For power intent to become explicit, it needs to be expressed in terms of Power Management parameters. These parameters are major indicators of the efforts involved in realizing the power intent. We introduce an automated method to extract two Power Management parameters (number of Control Signals and Power Modes) from ESL prototypes. These parameters are extracted in a two-step process. First, relevant structural and behavioral information of the prototype is retrieved and translated into an activity profile. Following this, an analysis is performed on the activity profile to extract the power management parameters. The effectiveness and efficiency of the method is demonstrated by its application on several ESL benchmarks.