April 11, 2012 -- Power is receiving a mounting share of attention. Innovation, fueled by the information and Internet age, poses new challenges for electronic systems across a spectrum of applications. To address these challenges, power-related design decisions are now being made throughout the product-development cycle. Yet it is the early decisions that primarily govern the power and energy profile of a product.It is not surprising that key choices include how the design is partitioned into hardware versus software, the design architecture, and even to determine how the software controls the hardware. Once the design architecture is locked in, the most power-efficient implementation may lose out to an alternative more power-efficient architecture, even if the alternative is implemented half as well.

If the impact on power reduces when you go down levels of design abstraction, then predicting power with accuracy is the challenge at the higher levels of abstraction. It is unreasonable to expect the power numbers from a mostly untimed transaction-level design model to closely match numbers from a post-implementation design representation. At the same time, early power numbers must offer sufficient accuracy to evaluate design trade-offs relevant to the design abstraction level.

By Preeti Gupta. (Gupta is Director RTL Product Management, Apache Design, Inc.)