Basic experimentation on accuracy of power estimation for CMOS VLSI circuits

In this paper, we discuss on accuracy of several kinds of power dissipation model for CMOS VLSI circuits. Some researchers have proposed several efficient power estimation methods for CMOS circuits [1][2][3][4]. However, we do not know how accurate they are because we have not established a method to compare the estimated results of power consumption with that of actual VLSI chip. To evaluate the accuracy of several kind of power dissipation model such as chip-level, block-level and gate-level etc., we examined as follows: (i) Measuring power consumption of actual microprocessors. (ii) Estimating power consumption with several kinds of power dissipation model. (iii) Comparing (i) with (ii). The experimental results show as follows: (1) Power estimation at gate level is accurate enough. (2) Estimating power of a clock tree independently makes estimation more accurate.