This paper deals with the problem of estimating the average powerconsumption (per clock cycle) of CMOS digital circuits. A newpattern-independent method is proposed for computing an upper bound onthe switching activity, and therefore the average power of acombinational circuit described at the gate level. The method is basedon the propagation of abstract waveform sets, described down to thelevel of individual transitions. The view of a gate as a relationbetween input and output signals, described by forward and partialinverse functions, permits the determination of a tight upper bound onthe power using a constraint resolution method based on waveformnarrowing. A fully scalable, case analysis-based algorithm provides atany step an upper bound and, with enough resources (CPU time), it cancontinue up to the exact solution. The paper presents the theoreticalbackground, a description of the implementation, and results onbenchmark circuits
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