Power characterization of functional units

In cycle-accurate RTL level power estimation, a table is used to characterize the power consumed by each functional unit. The size of the table grows exponentially with the size of the inputs. We present a partitioning power modeling technique to reduce the table size. Results indicate that this technique works for shifters and register files with reasonable accuracy and much smaller table size. Results also show that by multiplying a constant factor, this technique also works for multipliers. Simulation time is reduced significantly. Similar techniques may also work for dividers.