Hardware-Assisted Signal Activity Analysis for Power Estimation in Rapid Prototyped Systems

摘要

In this paper, a technique is proposed to gather statistical data concerning the activity of the internal signals in a complex application. By using an architecture precise rapid prototyping system, the signals can be analyzed over a long period of time and therefore, a realistic estimation of the signal characteristics is obtained. This information can be used for estimating the power consumption in the final system as well as for a later refinement of the communication structures and processing blocks. In order to account for deep submicron effects, not only transition activity but also inter-wire correlations are considered. Because of the huge amount of data that would be generated by a real-time monitoring, a statistical hardware compression module was implemented for embedding it into prototyped designs. It allows the trade off between hardware efficiency and estimation accuracy, in order to offer a flexible usage of the prototyping resources. The proposed approach has been validated in a baseband implementation and prototype of a simplified OFDM transmitter.