VCD to power consumption trace

[Martin Klein]

Hi all,

I have captured the toggle counts of my design in a VCD file and I
wonder if there are now any tools available that
allow me to plot a nice estimate of the dynamic power consumption of
my design over time. Maybe there exists a tool that also always me to
assign weights to the different nodes?

Many thanks for your help!

 

[KJ]

On Jan 17, 9:36 am, Martin Klein <patrick.batema...@googlemail.com>
wrote:

Hi all,

I have captured the toggle counts of my design in a VCD file and I
wonder if there are now any tools available that
allow me to plot a nice estimate of the  dynamic power consumption of
my design over time. Maybe there exists a tool that also always me to
assign weights to the different nodes?

Many thanks for your help!

If this is a design that is synthesized in Altera devices, then you
would use Quartus' Power Analyzer tool. That tool uses the VCD file
as input and it generates an output report breaking things down by I/O
or core, by voltage, etc.

If your design is targeting a device from some other supplier, then
presumably they will also have a similar type of tool.

Kevin Jennings

 

[Gabor]

KJ wrote:

On Jan 17, 9:36 am, Martin Klein <patrick.batema...@googlemail.com
wrote:
Hi all,

I have captured the toggle counts of my design in a VCD file and I
wonder if there are now any tools available that
allow me to plot a nice estimate of the dynamic power consumption of
my design over time. Maybe there exists a tool that also always me to
assign weights to the different nodes?

Many thanks for your help!

If this is a design that is synthesized in Altera devices, then you
would use Quartus' Power Analyzer tool. That tool uses the VCD file
as input and it generates an output report breaking things down by I/O
or core, by voltage, etc.

If your design is targeting a device from some other supplier, then
presumably they will also have a similar type of tool.

Kevin Jennings

Xpower from Xilinx does something similar, but you don't get any
indication of power as function of time. The .vcd file is used
as a "steady state" indication of power consumption, so you only
get a single number for each type of usage representing the average
usage over the time period simulated.

I suppose you could break the vcd into time segments and run the tools
through with each segment to see how power changes over time at a
crude scale. You might miss some narrow peaks, though.

-- Gabor