Dynamic power estimation using the probabilistic contribution measure (PCM)

In this paper, we present CubicPower which is a dynamic power estimator based on Verilog/VHDL. We propose the power characterization model and the probablistic contribution measure (PCM) algorithm to calculate the actual power consumption of cell instances with given switching information. In addition to PCM, the state dependency and nonswitching activity of gates are taken into account for morte accurate power estimation, Experimental results of CubicPower show less than 10% error compared with the results of PowerMill simulation and the measured values of the IMS test equipment. Due to the PCM algorithm CubicPower is more accurate than the leading commercial dynamic power estimator at the gate level and is 2-3 orders of magnitude faster than PowerMill.