Power Estimation Methodology for wireless chipsets

摘要

Wireless lan chipsets are ubiquitous, from mobile phones to IOT devices. Power consumption in these battery operated devices is critical, with wireless technologies using about 20% of mobile battery power. We propose a methodology to estimate and optimize the power consumption of wireless lan systems. We outline critical power consumption scenarios in wlan systems, followed by a method for early power evaluation using UVM sequences. Our method also refines the power estimates once the netlist and software become available. Our methodology identifies opportunities for power reduction at various stages of design of a wireless chipset. With our approach, we were able to identify a 30% savings in energy consumption of the receiver frontend, a 10% saving in the transmitter by identifying missed clock gating opportunities, and another 11% by optimizing the software.