What is the best Power Analysis tool?

[onailimissam]

Power Theatre(full-chip power analysis) and Cool Time(dynamic voltage drop analysis) from Sequence Designs are very good solutions to do power analysis.

i have the feeling that you are using powertheater.
May I ask you if you know how to get a dump file about capacitance values
estimated by powertheater, I mean: i can get a report about transition time
values used by powertheater during power estimation, is that possible
to get a similar report about capacitance for nets ?
many thanks in advance,
max

 

[nittinsharma80]

nanosim

 

[johnz]

In fact, it is important that engineers familiar with their EDA tools.

 

[brianhe]

Up to date, there are so far from synopsys and cadence can provide good
power analysis in static and dynamic

From RTL level, you can use power compiler to estimate ur module-to-module
power consumption
From gate level, you can use primepower to estimate the real gate level power
consumption with the provision of synopsys libraries
From transistor level, dynamically, you can use nanosim/hsim to do fast extraction on power consumption and use VCS with nanosim to do mixed mode power analysis especially on leakage or sleep mode current consumption which is so far the best and fastest mixed mode tool i have ever use the best
From PR online level, u can use Astro Rail to do static IR drop analysis or use voltagestorm to do this job

In my opinion, it is hard to do RTL level, or say standard cell based power analysis, for it is quite not accurate.
Take sysnosys compiler as example, normally it do the analysis in this way: cuculates the toogle times for each gate, get the related parameters from the lib,
multiple the power consumed each toogle with the toogle times add up all the gates.

So the toogle times depend on the test vectors you run. The parameter may not be accurate.
Seems that, it is more meaningful to do power analysis in transitor level, or say in full custom design, where the model is more accurate that can model the real physical truth.
Of cause, it is a terrible thing to do transitor level analysis for ASIC with thousands of or even millions of gates.

 

[manu_leo]

cooltime for dynamic and static power analysis and voltage storm for static power analysis are best tools for power analysis