The Petrol approach to high-level power estimation

High-level power estimation is essential for designing complex low-power ICs. However, the lack of flexibility, or restriction to synthesizable code of previously presented high-level power estimation approaches limits their use. In this paper we present a novel, more general and flexible high-level power estimation approach, that avoids these limitations. Petrol, as we call it, is not limited to specialized application domains, synthesizable VHDL, or data path parts of a design. We show that glitches can be usefully modeled at higher levels of abstraction. The Petrol approach shows good correlation with gate-level power estimates. It is currently used for commercial designs.