Common Power Format: A User-driven Ecosystem For Proven Low Power Design Flows

Abstract

Low power design has emerged as one of the urgent needs in IC design. The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) has identified the challenges surrounding low power design as one of the fundamental bottlenecks in exploiting the full capabilities of some of the advanced technology nodes. In fact, data from major chip design houses have underscored this need. Much attention has been focused world-wide on the three existing formats for expressing low power constraints and intent: Common Power Format (CPF) from Silicon Integration Initiative (Si2), UPF 1.0 from Accellera, and UPF 2.0/P1801 from IEEE. However, the real challenge lies in the development of design flows and tools that exploit the content expressed by designers in these formats to solve reallife, power-related issues in design. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that at Si2 the focus has been on both developing and standardizing CPF in a coalition of both users and EDA suppliers, and in creating an ecosystem that provides training and adoption aids for CPF to support its adoption by chip designers and tool developers alike and proliferation of CPF into design flows in IC companies around the world. This presentation begins with a brief introduction on Si2 and the Low Power Coalition (LPC) and the processes used in LPC to drive the development of CPF. There will be a discussion on the CPF roadmap with an introduction of the current standard CPF version 1.1 identifying the key enhancements over the previous version 1.0, and the roadmap leading to version 1.2 where interoperability with P1801 is one of the focus items. Next, we will describe some of the enablers provided by Si2 to support adoption, such as, training materials, a parser, a reference guide and a relational analyzer which can be used both to train in CPF as well as to analyze the contents of multiple CPF files used across the design. The talk will include examples of adoption by EDA companies and will conclude with results achieved to-date among IC design companies with references to some real-life success stories in low power design.