Automated Power Characterization for Run-Time Power Emulation of SoC Designs

With the advent of increasingly complex systems, the use of traditional power estimation approaches is rendered infeasible due to extensive simulation times. Hardware accelerated power emulation techniques, performing power estimation as a by-product of functional emulation, are a promising solution to this problem. However, only little attention has been awarded so far to the problem of devising a generic methodology capable of automatically enabling the power emulation of a given system-under-test. In this paper, we propose an automated power characterization and modeling methodology for high level power emulation. Our methodology automatically extracts relevant model parameters from training set data and generates an according power model. Furthermore, we investigate the automation of the power model hardware implementation and the automated integration into the overall system’s HDL description. For a smart card controller test-system the automatically created power model reduces the average estimation error from 11.78% to 4.71% as compared to a manually optimized one.