As per their newly inked agreement, CoFluent Design and Docea Power plan to develop interoperable solutions that they claim will accelerate power exploration and optimization of electronic systems. CoFluent provides system-level modeling and simulation related to embedded-device design, whilst Docea delivers software for power and thermal analysis at the architectural level.
“Power estimation and analysis is a crucial element when exploring and optimizing the architecture of electronic systems, as 80% of power gains can be obtained at this stage. However, true system-level optimization requires analyzing all system dimensions at once—behaviour , performance, power, and cost,” says Stéphane Leclercq, chief executive officer of CoFluent Design. “The interoperability between CoFluent Studio and Aceplorer allows for describing all the architectural dimensions of an electronic system and analyzing them from a single model. Full power optimization gains can be obtained only when all dimensions in system architecting have been investigated under various dynamic application scenarios.”
Ghislain Kaiser, chief executive officer of Docea Power, adds that “making tradeoffs between performance and power consumption is a critical activity at the architectural level for complex system designs. But exploring a large solution space that involves all the dimensions can be a nightmare without the right modeling methodology and the right tools. By working with CoFluent, we can separate the views of a complex electronic system and have the models work together in an efficient way to accelerate power exploration and optimization of electronic system designs.”
CoFluent Studio is a system-level toolset for modeling real-time embedded applications and use cases, and simulating their execution on multiprocessor/multicore platforms. Models are described graphically in standard unified modeling language (UML) or with the CoFluent domain-specific language (DSL). Transaction-level modeling (TLM) SystemC code is automatically generated for behavioural, time, and performance prediction.
Docea’s Aceplorer models, explores, and optimizes static and dynamic power and thermal behaviour of whole electronic systems. It integrates a consistent power data-management methodology for capturing and simulating power behaviour.
Both tools share a common methodological approach that separates the architecture from the applications. Aceplorer relies on a power state model to describe power information for the different components of the system. A platform architecture model describes voltage and clock domains and how those components are interconnected. These models can be captured directly in Aceplorer and simulated for power and thermal analysis.
With CoFluent Studio, a specific instrumentation interface generates the activity of platform components into Value Change Dump (VCD) format, which Aceplorer can interpret and run on the power model. Users can effectively capture complex and dynamic use case models, including computations and communications scheduling aspects, for behavioural, time, and performance exploration and optimization. The same models can now be used for detailed power and thermal exploration and optimization within Aceplorer. Models needn’t be recaptured into Aceplorer—a single system-level reference description is sufficient.