Perils of power prediction in early power-integrity analysis

Early power integrity and peak power analyses for multi-million gate system on chip (SoC) in advanced technology nodes pose significant methodology definition and implementation challenges. Typically in a SoC, processors and other high performance IPs are dominant contributors to peak power and power integrity issues. To get an early look ahead of potential power integrity issues and to estimate peak di/dt issues in the SoC, it is always desired to analyze potential issues early and address before a silicon failure. This paper presents an overview of implementation challenges faced in RTL based power for predictive power analysis and analyzing peak di/dt issues ahead of time in the context of TI C66× DSP core based multicore SoC.