PowerTheater-Explorer, an option to Sequence Design’s PowerTheater RTL power-analysis engine, adds power-visualization and debug capabilities for fast, interactive power reduction. By adding SmartSource Viewer, designers can determine hot spots in the design and visualize, debug, and interactively determine ways to reduce a design’s power. The hierarchical RTL power-tree display shows hotspots that can be cross-probed to schematics, showing connectivity and indicating how activity is moving through the design and how instances impact one another. These results can be displayed and analyzed at RTL, gate, or mixed levels of abstraction. SmartSource also provides a dedicated view of the clock tree for fast isolation and optimization.
The integrated waveform viewer in PowerTheater-Explorer can input qualified vectors for all modes of operation and report average modal power for package selection, or worst-case for preventing dynamic voltage drop problems. Waveforms can be viewed simultaneously to debug power problems, including power over time, peak power, and comparisons between logic and power waveforms.
Customized power-analysis features in PowerTheater-Explorer allow designers to write their own power data analyzers and reporting algorithms. That’s because the design data is stored in OpenAccess, an Si2 standard database.
PowerTheater-Explorer is also useful in power regression testing, for block or full-chip analysis. The PowerTheater analysis engine can run multiple power regressions at RTL overnight, and post process data to determine power-budget problems. PowerTheater-Explorer is the debug and visualization tool for power reduction. This new analysis environment lets large design groups employ PowerTheater engines for power estimation, and multiple PowerTheater-Explorers for visualization and debug for a focused team effort on power management.
PowerTheater-Explorer is sold as an option to PowerTheater and is part of the Sequence Design-For-Power flow. PowerTheater-Explorer will be available in the third quarter of 2007. North American pricing begins at $30,000 for a one-year time-based license.
Sequence Design