ESL Black Box Power Estimation
Gereon Onnebrink, Rainer Leupers, Gerd Ascheid · 2018
Power-aware design space exploration at early electronic system level (ESL) is highly facilitated by virtual platforms. In order to define and exchange power models, the IEEE standard 1801-2015 -- UPF has been defined to allow developers, vendors and customers seamless usage of the same power models. However, one obstacle is still not covered by the standard: it is not specified and solved how to construct the model in the first place. This paper offers a solution to close this gap. A well proven semi-automatic black box ESL power estimation methodology [17], which allows to have power estimates with approximately 5% error, is combined with UPF. Although the standard is based on power state machines and requires another tracing method, a procedure is presented to overcome these differences. Representative case studies show that similar estimation accuracy can be achieved.