( DAC 99 Item 54 ) ----------------------------------------------- [6/25/99]
MORPH'N POWER RANGERS DAC newbie Summus ( http://www.summusdesign.com )
boasted about its 'PowerEscort' pre- and post- layout power analysis tool
checking IR drop and electromigration problems. Simplex makes the same
claim to power fame. ( http://www.simplex.com ) At the RTL-level, old
guard Sente just introduced their 'WattSmith' RTL power optimizer, which
might bang heads with Synopsys' Power Compiler. And TransEDA has just
jumped into the RTL level power analysis game (playing catch-up w/ Sente
& Synopsys) by announcing their 'PowerSure'. ( http://www.transeda.com )
Veritools and Avanti/interHDL are minor league players in this game, too.
"It seems that Sente is the best. I saw also TransEDA and Veritool's
tools, but they are inferior. Probably the prices are proportional
but this is another issue."
- an anon engineer
"Sente: Power analysis tools. Claimed application to commercial uP
yielded 127 changes, e.g., reduce glitches in datapath. WattSmith:
makes temporary changes to database to estimate effect of change."
- an anon engineer
"Product: Sente Wattwatcher and Wattbots Rating: 3 gators (out of 4)
Wattwatcher provides an RTL and gate-level power estimation tool. I
have used the gate-level tool in the past and found it to be within
about 10% of the actual power dissipation levels. For RTL designs,
the accuracy can vary slightly with a 20-25% range being typical. In
past releases, the methodology for running gate-level and RTL-level
power estimation tasks differed from the user's perspective. These
have now been merged together in a more cohesive interface. The GUI
provides some nice color-coding features of the design hierarchy to
identify "hot-spots" within the design. The newest tool, called
Wattbots, provides intelligent monitoring agents which analyze a
design's power dissipation against a set of 'power rules' and makes
recommendations on how to change the design to reduce power. It even
quantifies the amount of power savings that occur and sorts the list
of recommendations from the highest to lowest impact. Being that
power is often difficult for designers to accurately estimate since
much of it is based on toggle rates and capacitive loads, tools like
Wattwatcher are very useful." ( http://www.sente.com )
- an anon engineer
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