Power Sensitivity Analysis of Combinational Circuits Using Statistical Method

Power dissipation has become one of the critical problems in the VLSI circuit design. For a given logic circuit, the power dissipation has strong relationship with the primary inputs. Circuits consume different power under different input vectors. Power sensitivity (PS) defines the characteristics of power dissipation due to changes in the states of primary inputs. In this paper, we study the problems and present a method to evaluate the PS based on the propagation of signal probability and activity. Then, we focus on its applications on the estimation of zero delay dynamic power and static power in detail. Experiments show that the method can greatly reduce the evaluation time with an acceptable accuracy. As a matter of fact, the statistical method can also be used in dynamic power estimation under delay models, input-specific power estimation, and the design of low power system.