RTL platform enables accurate power use analysis

Incorporating rapid prototype technology from the Cadence Genus Synthesis Solution engine, the Joules RTL Power Solution can analyse designs of up to 20 million instances overnight with gate-level accuracy within 15% of final power as signed off in the Cadence Voltus IC Power Integrity Solution. In addition, the Joules RTL Power Solution integrates seamlessly with the Cadence Palladium emulation platform and the Stratus High-Level Synthesis (HLS) platform for early system-level power analysis and optimisation.

Highlights of the Joules RTL Power Solution include accurate RTL power estimation, multi-threaded frame-based architecture, adjustable power analysis resolution, advanced data mining/debug and early system-level power analysis.

The Joules RTL Power Solution performs an ultra-fast design synthesis using an integrated prototype mode of the Genus Synthesis Solution, including physically aware clock tree and datapath buffering, and enabling accurate RTL power estimation.

Power analysis is parallelised across multiple CPUs accelerating in-depth power exploration. Multiple stimulus files can be analysed simultaneously and each stimulus file can be time-sliced into frames to enable time-based power reporting.

User-selectable frames can be used to zoom in on power-critical periods of the simulation, and multiple stimuli for different design hierarchies can be merged to mimic full SoC traffic and power consumption. This enables design teams to easily analyse critical power problems.

Power can be reported at the bit level or register level and may be categorised based on logic cell type, design hierarchy, clock domain, power domain or timing mode. A rich suite of library analysis and profiling tools is also included.

The Joules RTL Power Solution can be used within the Palladium Dynamic Power Analysis for more accurate time-based power calculations. This provides enhanced production-correlated peak and average power analysis, enabling design teams to analyse system power of software running on hardware early in the development cycle.

The Joules RTL Power Solution is also integrated with the Stratus HLS platform for earlier and more accurate power estimates, enabling IP teams to better evaluate system-level micro-architectural tradeoffs.

“We see a significant opportunity to improve the capacity and accuracy of power analysis during system-level design exploration,” said Dr. Anirudh Devgan, senior vice president and general manager of the Digital and Signoff Group at Cadence. “The Joules RTL Power Solution combines the strength of our production implementation flow with parallel stimulation file processing to offer a power analysis solution that is fast enough for system-level analysis, yet correlates well to signoff results.”