A database for the integration of power data on system level

Using state of the art design methods, advanced calculation of system power budgets is a major challenge. Currently, system design methods do not offer sufficient means for supporting energy awareness and efficiency throughout the complete system design process. In this paper, we present a power database for storing and predicting power data of integrated systems across abstraction levels, starting at system level and going all the way down to gate level. Our approach bases on the definition of multiple use cases per component, which allows for accurate power prediction of hierarchically defined systems already during the system-level design stage. This leads to reduced design costs as early power-affecting design decisions can be made on a sound basis. For evaluation, use cases for a commercially used network router component and its subcomponents were generated and power-simulated. After applying the results to the power database, we show that use case based power prediction on system level can be highly accurate, as our example calculation results in an error of less than five percent.