SmartPower

SmartPower identifies static and dynamic power consumption problems quickly within a design. It offers a distinct advantage over other power analysis tools by providing you a hierarchical view, allowing you to drill down and estimate the power consumption of individual components or events, rather than restricting you to the overall design. SmartPower analyzes power consumption for nets, gates, I/Os, memories, clocks, cores, clock domains, power supply rails, peak power during a clock cycle, and switching transitions.

SmartPower generates detailed hierarchical reports of the dynamic power consumption of a design for easy inspection. These reports include design-level power summary, average switching activity, and ambient and junction temperature readings. You simply input the target clock and data frequencies for your design, and let SmartPower perform a detailed and accurate power analysis. SmartPower supports importing files in the value-change dump (VCD) format, as specified in the IEEE 1364 standard. It also supports the Synopsys Switching Activity Interchange Format (SAIF) standard. Support for these formats lets you generate switching activity information in a variety of simulators and then import this information directly into SmartPower. In the absence of a simulation-driven VCD file, SmartPower efficiently uses its own unique vectorless estimation process to produce a power analysis that is nearly as accurate. When analyzing power, SmartPower assures a thorough analysis with the use of a power annotation report, which notes the various components within the design versus the power analysis methodology, and the resulting coverage up to 100%.

SmartPower User Interface

For portable or battery-operated applications, a power profile feature enables you to measure power and battery life based on a sequence of operational modes of the design. In most portable and battery-operated applications, the system is seldom fully on 100 percent of the time. "On" is a combination of fully active, standby, sleep, or other functional modes. SmartPower allows you to create a power profile for your design by specifying operational modes and the percent of time the device will run in each of the modes. Power is calculated for each of the modes and total power is calculated based on the weighted average of all modes.

SmartPower takes it to the next step by providing an estimated battery life based on the power profile. The current capacity for a given battery is input and used to estimate the life of the battery. The result is a much more accurate and realistic indication of battery life.

Realizing that significant power is consumed in the I/Os, SmartPower's I/O Advisor analyzes the I/O attributes within the design and suggests alternate output loads, drive strengths, and slew rates that will reduce the power consumption of the design if selected. SmartPower does this without compromising timing constraints, and points out the impact on positive and negative slacks, if any.