Power estimation using input/output transition anaylsis (IOTA)

Optimizing power dissipation is now a major concern in IC design. Accurate power estimation at the circuit level is too expensive. Tools which estimate power dissipation at higher levels of abstraction without sacrificing accuracy are of interest. We discuss a new cell-library based technique for power estimation. An I/O transition model is developed to represent energy consumption in library elements. Power estimation based on the I/O model requires less computational effort than with previous models. The I/O model also addresses accuracy limitation of previous models. A power estimation tool IOTA, based on this model, has been implemented in C and Matlab. For reasonably large combinational and sequential arithmetic circuits, IOTA has an average error of 5% and low simulation time compared to SPICE simulations