An Empirical Methodology for Power Analysis of CMOS Integrated Circuits

Abstract

Energy consumption is becoming one of the most significant aspects of CMOS Integrated Circuits (IC), especially for those applied in embedded devices whose autonomy depends upon battery lifespan. Therefore, an empirical methodology for determination of power and energy dissipation may provide valuable information to IC designers, as well as software developers, which could impact design process and lead to more energy-efficient solutions. This paper presents a novel methodology for determination of static and dynamic components of energy dissipation for those CMOS ICs that do not support turning off clock distribution entirely, but provide ability to divide a clock frequency. For that purpose, we used an Eclipse based IDE that provides a user friendly interface for dividing a clock frequency on ultra-low power embedded DSP platform, which was used as a target device. Measurements were performed using a true RMS multimeter. Various experiments were conducted using different scenarios, on single and multi cores, in order to validate the described empirical methodology, and the outcome confirmed what was expected, that the obtained results are stable and accurate.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.eie.23.5.19242