PEAK-POWER ESTIMATION FOR LOW POWER CIRCUIT DESIGN

_ G. Rajesh Kumar _J. E. N. Abhilash

WHAT IS THIS SEMINAR ABOUT?

Designing

low-power estimating Peak Power

on

testable

circuit

by

Focus

Issues arising from excessive test power Algorithmic solutions proposed to alleviate the lowpower test problems

PEAK POWER
Peak

power corresponds to the highest value of instantaneous power measured during testing.

Peak

power generally determines the thermal and electrical limits of the circuit and the system packaging requirements.

PEAK POWER

Peak Power can be expressed in terms of the highest energy consumed during a small instant of time during the test session:

Ppeak= MaxkPinst(Vk)= Maxk(EVk/tsmall)

PEAK POWER
The

average power during scan testing can be 3 times the power consumed during normal functional operation peak power can be 30 times what it is in normal functional operation

The

INTRODUCTION

Power dissipation in test mode is much higher than during functional mode

The circuit is highly stressed No correlation between consecutive test vectors

Test vectors ignore functional constraints DFT circuitry is intensively used Parallel testing is often used for efficiency Low-power functional features (e.g., gated clock) often disabled during test

WHY LOW POWER?

Excessive power dissipation can cause performance degradation Runtime errors Device destruction due to overheating Local hot spots that have a negative impact on circuit reliability

ENERGY AND POWER MODELING

Energy = total switching activity generated during test

has impact on the battery lifetime during power up or periodic self-test of battery operated devices

Average Power = Energy / Test time

has impact on the thermal load of the device

Peak Power = Highest value of instantaneous power

determines the thermal and electrical limits of components and the system packaging requirements
8

DYNAMIC POWER CONSUMPTION

Dynamic power consumption coming from the application of the i-th vector is proportional to the circuit weighted switching activity (wsai)

Cg is the physical capacitance associated to gate g NT is the number of times the output of gate g toggles due to the application of the i-th vector.

PEAK POWER REDUCTION

Both average and peak power consumption during testing can be efficiently minimized with the MTfilling heuristics

Test Cube: 0XXX1XX0XX0XX MT-filling: 0000111000000

ALPS ALGORITHM
ALPS: Analyzer of Low-Power Systems

Symbolic computation techniques, which allow computing the complete set of reachable states for sequential circuits of small and medium size

THE SYMBOLIC ALPS ALGORITHM

Reachable states set Computation

Analyzes the circuit and, by exploiting symbolic calculation techniques, computes all the reachable states reached

Peak-Power computation

3-tuple (S, V1, V2), where S reached, which maximizes the power consumption

PEAK-POWER ESTIMATION

A Genetic Algorithm has been adopted to find a 3tuple (S, V1, V2) that maximizes the peak-power consumption Encoding

Cross-over operator

Mutation operator

PEAK-POWER ESTIMATION
search for S in the previously computed states

S is substituted with the reachable one having minimum Hamming distance from S

Fitness function

SYMBOLIC MINIMIZATION OF THE HAMMING

DISTANCE For each state S* reached we first compute the Hamming distance between S and S*. Then select one of the states having minimum distance. W=S xor S* reached (W)= reached (S*)|S*=W xor S

THE APPROXIMATED ALPS ALGORITHM

A given number of random patterns are simulated, and the reached states stored in a hash table. Each time a new state is reached, it is added to the stored set The reachable state set is thus dynamically updated during the optimization process Identify the set of states having low Hamming distance from a given state S

RESULTS
PP(%) [Re PP(%) PP(%) Implemen [Symbolic [Approxim tation] ALPS] ated ALPS] 0 -17.28 -80.27 -59.06 -17.79 0 0 400 63.99 5.32 0 0 400 21.50 0

FF 8 14 15 19 21

PSFu 0.9 1.007 1.556 2.794 0.961

PSFh 0.9 0.833 0.307 1.144 0.79

H 0 3 1 6 6

CONCLUSION
Peak-power

is tightly coupled with the reachability of the initial state algorithm able to produce better results than those provided by previously proposed methods

The

QUERIES?

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Presented by G. RAJESH KUMAR J. E. N. Abhilash