SmartPower

SmartPower identifies static and dynamic power consumption problems quickly within a design. It offers a distinct advantage over other power analysis tools by providing you a hierarchical view, allowing you drill down and estimate the power consumption of individual components or events, rather than restricting you to the overall design. SmartPower analyzes power consumption for nets, gates, I/Os, memories, clocks, cores, clock domains, power supply rails, peak power during a clock cycle, and switching transitions.

SmartPower generates detailed hierarchical reports of the dynamic power consumption of a design for easy inspection. These reports include design-level power summary, average switching activity, and ambient and junction temperature readings. You simply input the target clock and data frequencies for your design, and let SmartPower perform a detailed and accurate power analysis. SmartPower supports importing files in the VCD (Value-Change Dump) format as specified in the IEEE 1364 standard. It also supports the SAIF (Synopsys' Switching Activity Interchange Format) standard. Support for these formats lets you generate switching activity information in a variety of simulators and then import this information directly into SmartPower.

SmartPower User Interface

For Portable or battery operated applications, a "Power Profile" feature enables you to measure power and battery life based on a sequence of operational modes of the design. In most portable and battery operated applications, the system is seldom fully "on" 100 percent of the time. "On" is a combination of fully active, standby, sleep, or other functional modes. SmartPower allows you to create a "Power Profile" for your design, by specifying operational modes and the percent of time the device will run in each of the modes. Power is calculated for each of the modes plus total power is calculated based on the weighted average of all modes.

SmartPower takes it to the next step by providing an estimated battery life based on the power profile. The Current capacity for a given battery is input and used to estimate the life of the battery. The result is a much more accurate and realistic indication of battery life.