Power-Aware Wrappers for Transaction-Level Virtual Prototypes: A Black Box Based Approach

Low power design and verification at the Electronic System Level (ESL) have recently emerged as a challenging research field. This work presents a reliable solution to add such capabilities to Transaction-Level virtual prototypes composed of black-box hardware Intellectual Properties (IPs). This solution relies on a wrapper-based approach in which power intent specification and verification are added as separate layers of the IPs functional ones. Using Synopsys´s InnovatorTM virtual prototyping toolset, our approach has been validated with an audio application TL platform. Results show our approach benefits to enable different power intent alternatives exploration with low simulation speed overhead and reduced modeling effort.